Cheerleader Massacre (2003)

Directed by: Jim Wynorski

Starring: Tamie Sheffield, Charity Rahmer, Erin Byron, Lenny Juliano (as Leonard Johnson), Summer Williams and April Flowers

Genre: Horror, Slasher, B-Movie

Rated: R

A group of cheerleaders, their coach, two male classmates and their van driver suffer car trouble on the way to a meet. Stranded in the mountains with a blizzard coming, the group hikes into the woods taking shelter in a random cabin. Unbeknownst to them, there is an escaped killer on the loose and heading their way.

I chose to watch this flick looking for a fun way to round out a night of movie watching. I love B-horror: the cheesiness, the bad special effects, the lame acting – but I was not expecting something this God-awful. Everything about this film is terrible, and not in the funny kind of way.

The plot itself isn’t that bad – a little clichéd, but still a fun premise for a low-budget slasher flick. Having teenagers trapped in a mountain cabin during a blizzard is a fun idea and one not often adopted. There’s something about a winter setting that makes slashers creepier to me, normally, but not with this film. For one thing, the blizzard talked about throughout the flick never comes. There is snow on the ground once the characters are in the mountains, but no snow begins to fall. The escaped killer isn’t scary in the slightest, and the climactic twist is extremely predictable by character name alone if you know your 80s slasher villains.

The acting is absolutely atrocious. These are supposed to be high school cheerleaders, yet they are obviously being played by women in their late twenties to early thirties. The coach doesn’t look any older than her students. They all act like they’re in a very bad high school play – like they’re reading their lines off of a cue card next to the camera. The only time they seemed to act naturally was during the nude/sex scenes – which shouldn’t be surprising since the imDb profiles for many of the actresses list porn titles.

There really was a lot of unnecessary nudity. There’s a locker room shower scene where all the girls are naked, a sex scene between one of the girls and one of the douchey stoner guys who tagged along, a shower scene for the coach, and a girl-on-girl three way scene dreamed up by the pervy van driver. None of these scenes were tastefully done and I felt like a voyeur watching these girls run their hands over their bodies and do things to each other. The three way with chocolate sauce in the bathtub was over the top and gross – not because it involved three women, but because I imagined the overpowering scent of cocoa filling the room and the awful yeast infections to follow. I know the male viewers will love these scenes – the women are attractive and do have great figures, but as a straight woman, they were not for me and served absolutely no purpose in the story whatsoever. I don’t like to mix porn with my horror, thanks.

Not to say there really was any horror. I get that the budget was very low and there was probably little room for special effects. However, they could have gone the route of many classic low budget slashers and used bloodless kills – such as the plastic bag kills in Black Christmas (1974) or strangulation deaths like those in Halloween (1978). Instead they stuck with off-screen kills which aren’t necessarily bad, but when you have no suspense or characters to care about, it doesn’t work for the film. What little blood they did use looked like fruit punch. I’ve made better fake blood for my Halloween parties.

The costuming was also ridiculous. These girls are supposed to be cheerleaders but there are no uniforms to be seen. They practice in regular street clothes rather than sweats or workout gear, shower, and then put those same clothes back on. I know the budget was low, but the actresses couldn’t have supplied their own clothing changes? Every girl has at least one pair of sweats or yoga pants hanging around. A goof like this could have easily been avoided, but I guess the director really wasn’t looking to be taken seriously. Also, the aforementioned blizzard is coming, yet everyone is walking around in skimpy cotton shirts, many of them not even having jackets to keep them warm when the van breaks down. If there’s a blizzard coming, how is it warm enough for t-shirts? Maybe it’s a different climate where this movie was based, but where I live, if there is going to be a snow storm, it’s way too cold for summer clothing.

The entire flick looks like it was shot on someone’s camcorder. The style is very amateur and reminded me of the in class Public Service Announcement I filmed for my intro to production class in college. As my excuse, that was the first time I’d ever gotten behind a camera. However, Jim Wynorski is an experienced director who has done projects such as the classic B-movie Chopping Mall (1986) but has apparently also worked on some porn since then. Here’s a hint, Wynorski, keep the two genres separate, and go back to making cheesy goodness like Chopping Mall when venturing into the horror realm.

Overall, if you’re looking for a fun, cheesy B-movie, this is not it. If you want a soft-core porno with mild violence and a crappy slasher story bookending it, this is the flick for you. 

1.5/10