Three Films Make A Post: Want to hear a scary story?

Bring it On: Cheer or Die (2022): Turning this perennial cheerleading movie franchise slasher-wards is a goofy idea that’s also all kinds of brilliant. Alas, the execution of this idea, as directed by Karen Lam with a screenplay credited to Alyson Fouse, Rebekah McKendry and Dana Schwartz, is about as limp, uninspired and un-fun as this could have turned out. The PG-13 rating surely doesn’t help the film, for where other horror sub-genres can survive without getting to gruesome, a slasher without creative kills lacks an important ingredient to work as it should. That the film only does much of anything with its cheerleading core in its final act when it turns out that cheerleading is a type of martial arts is another disappointment. Also not helpful are jokes that don’t hit (this is apparently supposed to be a horror comedy, though it’s difficult to notice), a cast that couldn’t handle funny lines anyway, and direction I’ll politely call uninspired.

Devil’s Workshop (2022): A struggling actor (Timothy Granaderos) in the running for a role as a demonologist spends a weekend at a real demonologist’s (Radha Mitchell) who pulls him into a bit of a supernatural psychodrama. At least half of the time, Chris von Hoffmann’s film actually is the twisty, blackly humorous, psychologically thrilling two-hander it so clearly wants to be, with some clever moments where a character’s inner life is supernaturally brought to the outside. Alas, it is a bit too distractible to quite reach its full potential, wasting too much time on the travails of our protagonist’s arch enemy (Emile Hirsch at his weaselliest); setting up a punchline really shouldn’t take up twenty minutes or so of screen time.

Mitchell does one hell of a job being ambiguous, weird and intense; Granaderos, while no slouch in the scenery chewing business sometimes can’t quite keep up with her.

Scare Me (2020): Speaking of actor’s workshops, this movie about two horror writers – one successful (Aya Cash), one would-be (writer/director of the film Josh Ruben) – acting out horror stories in a cabin during a power failure sometimes has a certain whiff of that sort affair. However, it’s a workshop where both main parties act and imagine their asses off in the best possible way, and whose director may be a bit showy, but also brilliantly effective in his showiness, building tension and mood out of thin air and sheer inventiveness. Unlike in our first entry, the sardonic humour hits nearly every time, and the script is much deeper and more clever than it at first appears; unlike in our second one, both leads are on the same level and wavelength throughout.

I suspect this is going to be a bit of a marmite film: its very specific type of cleverness and its go-for-broke intensity and personal weirdness will rub some people the wrong way. I found myself, unexpectedly, loving this approach to talking about scary stories, success and jealousy, and the kind of human interactions that can only end in tears and/or blood quite a bit.