Cheerleader Massacre

(2003) *1/2

Not as good as it sounds! Go figure. Basically a bunch of porn stars and their friends rented a condo in Tahoe and shot a movie on video. Real classy stuff.

A batch of high school students in their 30s run out of gas in the middle of a bad short cut while on their way to a game or something. Thinking they should head for higher ground for better cell reception, they walk blindly into the woods and happen to find a really nice, unlocked, food-stocked house they decide “hasn’t been occupied in some time.”

Meanwhile, there’s a killer on the loose, heading for the mountain home of the grizzled old cop who put him away. This secondary plot is a good thing, as it breaks up the tedious action over at the cheerleader’s house. Said action includes a curtainless shower scene and a soft-(soft, soft) core love scene. The first murder is a POV shot, a raised axe, a terrified look, and then a lame stream of red paint hitting a window. The next one is a headless guy knocking on the door, with a desktop cg effect so cheap and bad they only show it for three tenths of a second. When they needed something really out of their budget, they dropped in scenes from other movies, disregarding the obvious difference between film and video footage.

One such drop-in includes a scene from Slumber Party Massacre (which I recognized with embarrassing quickness), to support a cameo from the actual Slumber Party actress. I don’t know what this woman’s done to her face over the years but she looks bizarre, and she’s got a voice that sounds like squeezing a dead Canadian goose (yet she still manages a monotone delivery). I figured she was in there as a gimmick or a favor, but I looked on imdb and she’s been in a hundred zillion movies! I'm sure they're all very good.

I was lucky to have three other people watching this with me, which made it a lot more fun. This is a turkey through and through, but they hit the mark they were aiming for. The scariest things in this flick are monstrous fake boobs.