Navigation

Head Cheerleader, Dead Cheerleader (2000)

Dir: Jeffrey Miller

 

Heather Connelly (Tasha Biering) is the head cheerleader for the Cats cheerleading squad and is, along with her fellow pom pom wavers, getting ready for the
big college football game.
But when someone starts chopping up her cheerleading squad Heather is caught up in a web of murderous town secrets….

 

Writer/director Jeffrey Miller certainly has a old school horror fan’s love of the Slasher sub-genre and puts it to good use in the first half of his ultra low budget movie, where only the cheapjack FX and general ‘home grown’ look of the film letting the side down.
A stock company of Slasher cliché characters are trotted out (the creepy male coach, the douchebag boyfriend, the bitchy cheerleading honeys, the hot female coach, the weird old guy with a past, the bumbling Sheriff and the angry - flatulence filled - handyman) as are the old school stalking scenes and (cheap) gore moments, like a good old severed head discovery scene.
It may be cheap, generally badly acted and anything but original but there is an energy here, lots of incident and a fun 80’s attitude to the proceedings.
Though there are far too many ‘false scare’ scenes!

There is a rather more modern aspect to some of the dialogue though, as post-“Scream” fanboy conversations about the greatness of low budget horror films (Miller surely wanting his own effort to join that roll call of greatness) is mixed with Quentin Tarantino style talk about the sexual metaphors of fairground rides and Disney. But it's all done at a fast pace.

The film is rather too fast and lean for its own good actually.
Killings seem to happen with no sense of time and seem to get relayed via phone gossip. Characters are just bumped off only to be mentioned in dispatches a few minutes later with no linking footage to explain how people even know the murders have taken place (no discovery of the bodies scenes or cops on the case scenes, and even then occasionally the news of a murder is known by some of the characters but not others, again making you wonder how the news of them is actually relayed.

As we have a film about cheerleaders we must surely have nudity? Indeed we do, but only two topless scenes are provided (one by minor cult sctress Debbie Rochon) so there is not the amount of gratuity we would have all liked, but hey, at least we have something!

As far as the violence goes, there’s a very childish, bad taste sexual aspect to the otherwise bog standard axe attacks due to the fact the killer has a marvellous aim as far as breasts go.
Rubber mammaries fall like autumn leaves here and only the joke shop comedy boobs used for the chopped off appendages keeps the grossness away.
The rubber globes are joined by an equally rubbery head and foot so as not to feel lonely.
Sadly after a good couple of these ‘so bad they’re good’ axe murders the rest of the killings happen not just off screen, but off screenplay as it later turns out that most of the cheerleaders we have had to watch gossiping for 10 minutes at a time have all been bumped off, yet the audience had no idea and were shown absolutely nothing.
It seems the budget ran out before any more killings could be filmed, let alone more rubber titties trotted out.And with that ‘seems they ran out of money’ issue we come the real problems with the film as well as the end of the positive aspects of it.

One bewildering aspect of the film is that it is meant to be set on Halloween, but you really wouldn't know it as there is zero Halloween atmosphere or even any basic trappings to be seen. Halloween is the most horror movie friendly time of year where atmosphere is easy to recreate with little effort or expense needed, yet here it is completely ignored except for a couple of dialogue nods to it.
We also lack a strong Slasher villain as the film plays up the deaths more as a who-dunnit so we never see the killer.

Suspects and red herrings are thrown at the screen in almost parody level numbers and are as subtle as a flying crimson tit, including a creepily pushy token black guy named Chris (Andre Walker) who shows up at Heather's with a naked painting of her as a gift!
To say that almost everyone in this town is whacked out 'n' weird is an understatement.
But although there is obviously a bit of tongue in cheek humour here, the film does not really know if it is a total parody or a generally serious film with some comedic aspects.

Far too many times the film also gets bogged down in scary phone calls (the annoying voice of one Hal Perry) that are not remotely scary and far too long. And they are the root of all evil that now smother the last half of the movie.
At one point the film suddenly decides to stay in Heather's house for the remaining running time as she takes endless weird, plodding, phone calls from the killer and opens the door to all known local weirdo’s.
Now all of a sudden the trashy energy the film had has been sapped by walls of nothingness filled dialogue as the film imprisons itself, in Heather's living room.
If I had to face another just one more close up of that damn phone receiver I think I would have climbed into the screen and smashed the thing to pieces!
Hell, seeing as it's meant to be Halloween the makers could at least have shoved a damn pumpkin on a shelf and a paper ghost on a wall here at least to add some kind of atmosphere to Heather's drab room as we wallow ceaselessly on her couch.
Again this screams that the budget was almost gone so the director just set up camp in the bland living room for the rest of the movie.

The big reveal of who is doing the killing is once again just some characters talking in that damn living room as well.
And when I say talking...I mean talking!
The motive for the slayings was so long-winded and unstructured I had to wind the film back twice to give myself any chance of trying to follow the reasoning on display here.
And I'm not exactly sure what all the component parts of this motive are even now!
The one shining light in this stygian dialogue filled pit is that the complex motivation and execution of the plan is actually ridiculed at
one point by Heather when she points out there was a quicker and easier way to accomplish it all!
But wait! Even after all that talk there seems to be yet another twist to explain...with yet more talk!

Now the trailer for “Head Cheerleader…” may crassly use the theme from “Halloween” on it, but the finale of the film itself is now as far from the violence filled, tension drenched scare fest that made up the finale of Carpenter's classic as you can get!
And this dialogue heavy finale would be deadening enough anyway, but coming right after spending 15 odd minutes of watching a person sitting on a couch answering the phone it reaches hellish heights of tedium as all the fun energy the film had initially displayed is disappointingly dispensed with. Worse, this energy is dispensed with at the time such movie should actually be cranking it up to even greater heights!

To be fair there is a very brief 'trying to escape the psycho' sequence at the very end (though here escaping means just moving into the kitchen!) that delivers some possibly intentional humour in the
way it plays out and the use of choice dialogue like "Now I'm going to kill yer! Then I'm going to fuck yer! And then I'm going to kill yer some more"!
At last some of that energy and fun re-appears but it's far too little far too late and yet again we need another weighty monologue at the end of it to explain this new plot twist before the (final, final) ending reveals that actually something else was also going on but we are left, even with all that dialogue we just sat through, with no idea what it was or whom it involved!

So a cheap but fun homage to 80’s Slasher films turns into a maddeningly dull phone conversation on a couch.
How frustratingly tragic.