The horror festivities were not to my liking today.
Bring It On: Cheer or Die is available now on DVD and digital and will premiere on October 7th on Syfy. On the same subject : O-Zone: Keep crying.
Bring It On: Cheer or Die is painfully disappointing in a way that I haven’t had time to reconcile yet. How does the slasher entry bring the least bite in this cutthroat cheerleading franchise? Karen Lam’s direction reeks of lifetime after school that constantly forgets to be a horror film. Rebekah McKendry and Dana Schwartz’s script reads as if someone forced them at gunpoint to update a shelved “Bring It On” pitch with Halloween marketability. There’s more blood on the poster’s abdomen than in all 90 minutes, the performances are mixed (to put it nicely), and whatever the brand’s excitement, the whole “Bring It On goes Horror!” surprise ignited? That deflates faster than Pennywise’s balloons against a rocket launcher blast.
In this Bring It On canon, Diablos cheerleaders square off with no aerial combos against vastly superior programs like the White Knights. They are locked out by Toss and the like by Principal Simmons (Missi Pyle), a throwback from an incident some 20 years ago when a Diablos airman broke his neck in a stunt. Simmons threatens co-captains Abby Synger (Kerri Medders) and McKayla Miller (Tiera Skovbye) with eradicating the program if they attempt such routines on campus. Because of this, the leaders of Diablos decide that their Cheer Squad will practice overnight on Halloween weekend at an abandoned high school across town.
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All the makings of a farcical sleepover slasher flick with choreographed pep routines, none of the execution to make anything of meaning.
It’s obvious that Bring It On: Cheer or Die envisions itself as a gateway horror for youngsters, but there’s a vague interest in delving into horror frameworks. The PG-13 rating almost feels like a hoax considering how slasher ferocity is padded like mats stacked on the gym ceiling. The script attempts to be garrulous and bubbly, but dialogue feels obnoxiously manufactured, whether it’s contemporary high schoolers quoting gremlins (“Bright Light,” uh huh) or reading shots of shots unnaturally. Lam strives to hide slasher attributes in every way possible, unlike recent Gateway horror films like Spirit Halloween, which do their job of pushing younger viewers to some of the hard-edged frontiers of horror fun.
The slasher action is 100% bloodless as the Diablos mascot chases down cheerleaders who keep dispersing in the now creepy abandoned warehouse. No joke; There’s a visible trail of blood as [redacted] a noticeable plastic knife presses against the injured blonde cheerleader’s neck, but it’s more believable that the prop master accidentally smeared strawberry jelly on the fake gun. Absolutely no blood is shown, nor are there any practical death effects, whether a guillotine paper clipper chops off fingers or a garden tool slits someone’s throat – the camera refuses to show severed fingers while the victim, with a throat wound, falls over without a drop on the ground (seen from above).
Bring It On: Cheer or Die’s draining of crimson liquids is embarrassing considering how its cinematography doesn’t distract consciousness. The filmmakers hope you’ll forget how bodies bleed as they pan with their heads averted over clean corpses or covertly overturned punctures. It employs cheap tricks that shatter any tickle of horrible mood, especially as the actors seem to forget they’ve been wounded multiple times — even with limp darts sticking out of their arms like they’ve been taped on as a workaround for a backyard home movie. Lam has no control over the suspense that otherwise drives slasher crime scenarios and squanders every possible entry-level mystery. Horror elements are almost as unbelievable as the excitement of rudimentary cheering activities sold as next-tier achievements, or extraordinarily staged falls when pyramids topple bodies for dramatic reasons.
As a Bring It On movie, it lacks meaty conflict because we’re just stuck with Diablos and missing that squad-on-squad banter.
Too many crazy concepts flood the mind when you hear “Bring It On, But Horror,” and Bring It On: Cheer or Die doesn’t use any of them. As a Bring It On movie, it lacks meaty conflict because we’re just stuck with Diablos and missing that squad-on-squad banter. Perhaps a tighter horror film would take away that frustration, but as it is, McKendry and Schwartz are in limbo even when it comes to the lowest-bar horror terms. Bring It On: Cheer or Die masquerades as a horror title; Hardly a crumb stuck to the bottom of far superior gateway horror choices like Hocus Pocus for no particular reason. Do you factor in the laziness of killing key characters off-screen, staggering at the pace of a breathless Jason Voorhees, and poser attitudes toward slasher homage? Not even Missi Pyle’s craziest eyes can save this jumpable train wreck from an insultingly ill-conceived stunt sequel.
Verdict
Bring It On: Cheer or Die is everything a competent slasher shouldn’t be, even a gateway slasher. It’s cheesy bloodless, inexcusably moody, devoid of genre investments, and needs to be scraped off the bottom of this year’s Halloween movie barrel. This may interest you : Meet the Falcons cheerleaders: Mallory. Rebekah McKendry’s involvement thrilled me because she’s proven, both as a filmmaker and a journalist, that she knows horror—false hope, I’m afraid. A twisted trick played on slasher movie lovers who (like me) howled over the concept presents arguably the worst Bring It On franchise entry yet (I’ve admittedly not kept up with the Worldwide Cheersmacks or Fight to the Finishes) . Bring It On: Cheer or Die deserves no redemption as this wannabe Disney Lite player never takes a single step in sync with the horror genre and messes up his landing worse than Candice in Final Destination 5.
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Bring It On: Cheer Or Die Review
Bring It On: Cheer or Die is a miserable Halloween cash-in that struggles with its horror twist at every turn, which is embarrassing even for an entry-level horror film looking to lighten its genre ferocity. To see also : PHOTOS: Atlanta Falcons Rookie Minicamp | Example | gwinnettdailypost.com.
