Crew
Director/Screenplay – David Zagorski, Producers – Johnny Donaldson & Erin Fitzgerald, Photography – Ben Cassiani & Lexie Piepmeier, Music – Jason Arnold, Makeup Effects – Christina Long. Production Company – Mad Z Productions/The Ryan Road Company.
Cast
Matthew Marcus (Drew), Alicia McNeill (Jenna), Rabel Bueno (Roman), Chhoyang Cheshatsang (Elliot), Torie Jock (Rachel), Shtefany Lamoureux (Anya), Leah Thomas (Carli), Connor Holden (Ryan), Dominique Libera (Sara), Bryan Cohoon (Jason), Jim Kavanaugh (Jenna’s Dad), Zain Walker (Matt), Erika Lynn Jolie (Sienna)
Plot
Drew and eight friends head up to the old family cabin to celebrate graduation. Drew is hoping to finally get the opportunity to have sex with his virginal girlfriend Jenna. Amid the drunken partying and fooling around, someone starts killing members of the group.
Horny Teenagers Must Die! gets full marks for a sensational title. With such a title, it sets up certain expectations of a Slasher Film that goes for the exploitation throat. The nearest point of comparison might be to Don’t Fuck in the Woods (2016), a similar slasher film that plumbed an exploitation vein and came with a title that grabbed your attention. Your hope is that this might be another in the spate of films that cleverly parodied and deconstructed the slasher film with the likes of Scream (1996), Cherry Falls (2000), Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) and The Final Girls (2015).
Alas, this comes nowhere near being the case. What does stand out about Horny Teenagers Must Die! is just how unlikeable a bunch of characters said horny teenagers are. At one point. they have the nerdy Elliott (Chhoyang Cheshatsang) tied up to a tree and are shooting at him with a bow and arrow, trying to do a William Tell with a can of beer on top of his head, while he is crying and pleading with them not to. He is even complaining that he has been shot in the leg – something we don’t see – and is simply told “Shut up, bitch.” In that everybody, including the nice guys in the group, seems to find this an okay act, it becomes a film where you cannot help but want to cheer on the group when they start to be killed. The most unlikeable of the characters is Rabel Bueno’s Roman, who turns into an assertively bullying and a fly-off-the-handle rageaholic.
Horny Teenagers Must Die! does have its share of demented moments. While the film never does much to fulfil the horny part, we do get a scene where Dominique Libera is pegging Connor Holden while he is wearing the head of a furry suit, before the killer comes up and strangles her with a belt and beheads him with a machete. Things become positively absurd towards the ending where Alicia McNeill stops in the midst of the group fleeing from the killer to lose her virginity, while Leah Thomas is stabbed with a vibrator hammered into her mouth, all before a hard-to-believe twist revelation of the killer’s identity.
Horny Teenagers Must Die! was the third full-length film for David Zagorski who had previously made Killing Brooke (2012) and The Devil’s Nightmare (2012), as well as written the scripts for The Wickeds (2005) and Road Kill (2014).
Trailer here