Crew
Directors/Screenplay – Lucky McKee & Chris Sivertson, Music – David DiIorio, Special Effects/Makeup Effects – Zach Passero. Production Company – McKee-Sivertson.
Cast
Shelli Merrill (Leena Mako), Jesse Hlubik (Terry Stankus), Chris Heinrich (George Skank), Zach Passero (Vic Dario), Matthew Shabesta (Manny Mankiwietz), Erik Van Bebber (Ben Fector), Jennifer Carpenter (Hanna Popkin), Drama (Tracy Beezley), Jennifer Grant (Martha Apple), Marleena Waid (Maddy Makokey), Melinda Sparks (Tasha Kindle)
Plot
When one of the cheerleaders makes the comment that the routines they learn are just as tough as the ones the school’s football team practice, several of the jocks on the Skull County football team decide they need to be taught a lesson. They take the cheerleaders out into the country and run them through football practice. However, when the cheerleaders end up beating the footballers in a game, the jocks get mad. Fleeing during the fight that ensues, the cheerleaders fall over a cliff to their death. Five years later, it is the school’s reunion. Some of the jocks gather together. However, Leena Mako, a surviving cheerleader who gave each of her fellow cheerleaders a pendant from one of her witchcraft rituals, calls upon the cheerleaders and they rise from the grave to take bloody revenge.
All Cheerleaders Die was the first film from directors Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson. The film never attained much attention when it came out and was not widely seen. Both McKee and Sivertson went onto bigger and better things. McKee gained attention soon after with the weirdly culty May (2002), followed by the horror film The Woods (2006) and couple of non-genre films Red (2008) and Blue Like You (2008), before making the controversial The Woman (2011) and subsequently Kindred Spirits (2019) and Old Man (2022), as well as the Ding Dong episode of Tales of Halloween (2015). Sivertson dallied writing screenplays before solo directing the fine psycho film The Lost (2005), the Lindsay Lohan bomb I Know Who Killed Me (2007), Don’t Wake Mommy (2015), Heartthrob (2017) and Monstrous (2022).
Both McKee and Sivertson have had estimable careers as directors since making All Cheerleaders Die. The surprise in watching All Cheerleaders Die after seeing eithers subsequent work is how amateurish a film this is. McKee and Sivertson were just out of film school and the film was shot over two long weekends – and it shows. Everything from the sense you get that much of the show has been shot by them finding an empty field and filming there to the proliferation of family names over the credits to amateur-seeming touches like a credit for ‘Food by O’Ma’ and a list of credits for inspiration at the end that includes the likes of Stephen King, George Romero, Sam Raimi, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Martin Scorsese, Lloyd Kaufman, John Rollin, Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park (1997- ) fame, John Waters and Russ Meyer, as well as what would be a then unknown Rian Johnson.
The photography and sound quality all give further evidence of amateur filmmaking. The performances are nothing to speak of for the simple reason that both the cheerleaders and jocks are such an agglomerate mass than few of the characters get any individuation. Jesse Hlubik does stand out as the bullying leader of the jocks where he projects a certain dangerousness. The one that stands out the most is Shelli Merrill, who gives a wonderfully serene and aloof performance. Just the way the camera focuses in on her Mona Lisa smile as she walks through the chaos is great. Alas for Merrill, she appeared in three other films, produced Sivertson’s The Lost, and then retired from acting to become a psychologist in Santa Rosa, CA.
About halfway through, All Cheerleaders Die turns from a glorified home movie into something else as the cheerleaders are raised from the dead. It then becomes an all-out Zombie Film where the cheerleaders come back after the jocks but then decide to fairly much go for everybody else including overrunning the school reunion and attacking everyone there. It becomes gore drenched and you have to admire McKee and Sivertson in that, if nothing else, they go for such with abandon.
Several years later, McKee and Sivertson returned to conduct a better-budgeted remake with All Cheerleaders Die (2013).
Full film available here