| Cherry Falls Released: 2000 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Slasher Nuts and Bolts: Welcome to Cherry Falls, where sluts can be heroes! A killer is stalking the students of George Washington High School. But unlike other serial killers, this one hunts VIRGINS! A twenty-seven year old secret comes to light as the population of Cherry Falls decides to shuck their virginity. Summary: Rod and Stacy are making out in their car near look out point in Cherry Falls Virginia. Just as things are beginning to get hot and heavy, a second car pulls up behind them. A person with long black hair obscuring their face gets out and proceeds to stab Rob multiple times with a knife. Stacy tries to get away but is nailed to a tree. The word ‘Virgin’ is carved on the inside of their left thigh. That night we also meet sixteen-year-old Jody Marken. Jody is having a fight with her boyfriend Kenny Ascott. Kenny wants to get laid, but Jody isn’t ready to give up her virginity just yet. Tired of having to be put off for over a year, Kenny decides its time to call it quits. Before the argument can progress any further, we meet Jody’s mom, Marge. Marge seems to be one of these hip new age moms that wants to be pals with her daughter. She even goes so far as to bum a smoke and flirt with Jody’s boyfriend. The following day, news of the deaths reaches the student body of George Washington High School. Jody’s father, Brent Marken (Michael Biehn) is the town sheriff and he meets with principal Tom Sisler to discuss the crime. Brent tells Tom that he plans on addressing each of the classrooms in order to warn students of the danger that exists. He is reluctant to reveal too many details however because of the nature of the crime. Teacher Leonard Marliston addresses his own class and holds a feel-good meeting between all his students so that everyone can say something nice about the deceased. We meet all of the other High School archetypes here including the class clown, the nerd and the school slut. Jody learns that Kenny has already moved on to greener pastures and is seen with his arm around a girl named Cindy. That night, Sheriff Marken decides to hold a parents only meeting at the school gymnasium. Jody and her friend Timmy catch word of it and decide to sneak in to see what is being said. At the meeting, Marken reveals that the killer is predominantly stalking virgins. Parents become concerned that their children may start losing their virginity just so they are taken off the endangered species list. Believe it or not, a fight breaks out between the parents when one of the fathers alludes to another that his daughter has nothing to fear from the killer. The entire gym erupts into a riot. Meanwhile, Jody and Timmy decide that they should let all of their friends in on the details. Timmy plans on revealing all in the school newspaper. But Timmy becomes headline news himself as the killer appears in the school hallways. Jody finds her friend stuffed into a closet with his throat slashed open. The killer appears and begins chasing Jody all over the school. He gets her on the floor and begins carving the word virgin into her leg. Jody survives though as her father appears on the scene. The killer however gets away. The following day, the students of GW High rally together and declare their plans for having a massive orgy Friday night. It is their belief that if they all get fucked then the killer won’t have any interest in them. The police are pretty pissed over the news leak and Principal Sisler tries to learn the location of the planned fuck-fest. Marken has her daughter give a description of the killer. After having a concept artist sketch a picture, Brent realizes that he may know who the killer is. The sketch resembles a woman named Loralee Sherman, a girl that Brent used to go to school with. Brent decides to track Loralee down and he travels to a small farmhouse in West Virginia. He doesn’t find her however, but rather finds the broken down remains of a dilapidated home and a baby carriage. While Brent is out of town, Jody asks her mother about Loralee. Marge reveals that Loralee was a woman they knew in high school twenty-seven years ago. Loralee was a shy, homely plain-Jane girl who mostly kept to herself. One night she was stranded upon the side of the rode and four drunken members of the football team came upon her. Deciding to have some late night fun, the four teens took turns raping Loralee repeatedly. The crime never went on record and no investigation ever took place. One of the rapists was revealed to be principal Tom Sisler. The other was Jody’s father Brent. Brent returns to Cherry Falls but is attacked by an unseen presence. WARNING: The identity of the killer will now be revealed! While all this is going on, the students of George Washington High hold their “Pop Your Cherry” ball at a nearby lodge. Everyone attends and even the most loathsome troglodytes have a chance of getting laid. The only ones not in attendance is Jody and boyfriend Kenny. Back at Kenny’s house, Jody decides to finally cave in and sleep with him. But now its Kenny’s turn to be put off. He only wants to have sex with her if Jody wants to have sex with HIM and not out of some sense of preservation. Jody gets pissed off and leaves his room. Unsure of where to turn, Jody decides to visit her favorite schoolteacher Leonard Marliston. Jody confides in Mister Marliston who invites her into his home. Marliston’s personality does a complete 180 and he pushes Jody down the steps into his basement. It is revealed that he has Brent Marken tied up down there as well. Marliston begins putting on make up and dressing up in the style of clothes worn by his mother Loralee Sherman. He even has a long black wig with a white streak in it. Apparently Marliston is the product of the rape committed by Marken and the others. He believes that Brent may actually be his father. Marliston had decided to take his vengeance upon the student body and take their innocence (virginity) from them just as his mother’s was taken from her. He forces Brent to reveal all of the gruesome details from that fabled night to his daughter. At this point, Kenny decides that he wants to make up with Jody. He tracks her down to Marliston’s place and learns that the schoolteacher is the killer. While Kenny struggles with Marliston, Jody tries to escape. Kenny gets stabbed and Marliston returns downstairs to finish off Brent and Jody. He kills Brent with an axe and Jody escapes upstairs. Jody runs to the orgy house in hopes of getting people to help her. Marliston follows her there and begins hacking through the students to try and get to her. Attacking her on a balcony, Jody uses a self-defense maneuver on him, pitching his ass over onto the ground below. Marliston dies. Kenny is revealed to have survived his earlier attack. Acting/Dialogue: Most of the acting is pretty weak here. Brittany Murphy (Jody) is just annoying to look at and her acting isn’t much better. But hell, she offers us a lot more than most of the other High School Students. The only ones who really give us a command performance are Michael Biehn (Brent) and Jay Mohr (Marliston). Biehn is pretty hollow through the first half of the script but towards the end, we begin to finally see some of the talent that we all know he has. It’s interesting to see Jay Mohr taking a break from his Saturday Night Live skits to play the part of a villain. Although his character is pretty shallow in this, Mohr pulls it off with just the right amount of panache so as to NOT remind us that he’s a comedian. Gore: Pretty slim pickings here. There are only a few deaths and most of the actual ‘kill’ scenes are done off camera. Example: We never actually SEE Marliston stab Rod with knife. We also never see him kill Timmy. And with Marken, all we see is Marliston coming down with the axe. They don’t even show his twitching blood soaked body. Guilty Pleasures: Talk about the disappointment of the year 2000. Here we have a film where 40% of the plot revolves around a massive orgy. You would think there would tits and dicks flopping about all over the place, wouldn’t ya? Nope. If you’re lucky, you might catch a quick flash of a nipple here or there but that’s pretty much it. The gore and nudity in this flick is about equivalent to that of a PG-13 film. The Good: I got a kick out of the little double entendres. They’re not really subtle here with names like CHERRY FALLS VIRGINIA now are they? The film starts off pretty solid. We get a nice prologue of what’s to come done in a cliché and yet enticing manner. Following that, the film is paced pretty nicely and all the main ingredients are put into place right away. The scenes are interconnected in a tight fashion and director Geoffrey Wright never loses his audience at any point in the film. I was relieved to see that Wright didn’t go with the typical modern high school shtick where every single student has perfect teeth and a $900.00 hair cut. In Cherry Falls, the characters are flawed and humbled. Although most of the characters fall into an archetype, there are no black and white cardboard cut outs here. Even the protagonists have a dark side to them, which I think contrasts nicely to the entire ‘loss of innocence’ theme that’s going on here. We find out that our heroes have a few dirty secrets, and even the dick-heads can muster up some principles here and there. One quality in Wright’s work that I found to be amusing was the breakdown of the classic slasher formula. Most slasher flicks are meant to be a warning against pre-marital or unsafe sex. If you notice in just about any other horror film, the copulating couples are almost ALWAYS killed off. Morality is preserved thanks to the efforts of whatever local extremist happens to be wielding and axe at the time. But Wright teaches us that keeping our sticks and berries under lock and key is a big bad no-no. There truly IS safety in numbers and you can’t get better numbers than at a Friday night gang-bang. Leave it to the virgins to fuck shit up for everybody else. I also really liked the riot at the gymnasium. It’s an interesting twist wherein we see the children forced to behave like adults while the parents of Cherry Falls become a group of schoolyard scrappers. The Bad: I like to refer to this movie as Diet Scream. It really is just a watered down version of every teen slasher cliché that one could expect to squeeze into a 92-minute film. Within the first half an hour, you already have a pretty good idea of who the killer is and by the time we learn of Loralee Sherman, it’s pretty much confirmed. The worst flaw in this film comes from the character of Brent Marken. Played by Michael Biehn, Brent should have been the hero of this flick. But after we learn his secret past, it becomes really difficult to have any sympathy for him. Part of you wants to forgive him for his past actions, and yet you also feel that justice is served when Marliston sinks the axe into his chest. I can respect the duality of his character, but in a cinematic sense it fails miserably. The villain has a really lame motive as well. Now I understand that he is the product of an unorthodox courting ritual, but I really don’t see that as being enough of a reason to become a total fruit loop. If the killer were his mother it would make a helluva lot more sense. If he were really that uptight, you would think Marliston would make the rapists his primary targets. But he only manages to nail two of them and that doesn’t even occur until the last leg of the film. (Yes, he killed Principal Sisler too. I just didn’t feel the scene was noteworthy enough to mention in the above summary.) All in all, it sounds to me like this guy was just a fucking whacko by nature and decided to use his mother’s unfortunate past as an excuse to propagate his whackoness. As the years go by, the motives for horror movie slashers become more and more dumb. There’s a lot of stuff going on here that I just don’t get. Firstly there is the matter of Marge Marken. What the hell is up with this bitch? When we first see her she is flirting with Jody’s boyfriend. In every other seen involving mother and daughter, the two seem to share an EXTREMELY close relationship. Now I understand that there are lots of daughters out there who regard their mothers as their best friends, but the dynamic between these two is just bizarre. In almost every scene they are in together, they are hugging and kissing and pawing at each other. Not in a total deviant lesbo way, but Wright definitely hints that something a little kinky is going on here. Or maybe I’m just a sick twist who’s seeing something here that really isn’t present. Regardless, Wright paints the Marken family dynamic into an extremely questionable corner. (There’s also a scene where father and daughter are practicing self-defense. Brent falls on top of Jody in an extremely suggestive manner.) I get the impression that Wright wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted this movie to be. And to be honest, I’M not exactly sure what he’s striving for here either. Are the banal clichés a tip of the hat to modern horror flicks or are they just a sterile rip-off? The tagline for the movie compares it to American Pie. So is this supposed to be a comedy as well? With the exception of the parent riot, I really don’t see the comparison between the two. At its core, Cherry Falls is a predictable one trick pony with a bland cast of characters. In attempting to imitate such films as Scream and Urban Legend, it fails to captures the presence that made those films the luminaries of the genre today. This is what happens when someone tries to make a Kevin Williamson movie WITHOUT Kevin Williamson. Great Lines: “She thinks fellatio is a character in Shakespeare.” --Ben talking in reference to Cindy. “Well, I would like to know if this killer removed any body parts or sexually defiled any orifice of the victim.” --Ben inquiring about the deaths of the students. “Why are you wearing lipstick?” “Because you’re so pretty.” --Kenny speaking to Leonard Marliston Overall Rating: 4 out of 10 severed heads. |
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