‘She thinks fellatio is a character in Shakespeare…’
Of all the weird and wonderful ’90s teen slashers I have enjoyed and endured over the last few weeks, this one is the most nuts. As an elevator pitch, the premise isn’t bad, but in the execution, everything very quickly slides out of control…
In the small town of Cherry Falls, a mysterious murderer is killing virgins. He isn’t sacrificing them though which feels like a waste. The pagans would be furious. Final girl Jody (Brittany Murphy), whose father (Michael Biehn) is inevitably the sheriff, mulls over whether she would rather be brutally murdered or have sex with her incredibly annoying boyfriend Kenny (Gabriel Mann) – two no doubt equally dismal possibilities.
Where to start with this one… I honestly don’t know. The whole thing is just really odd. Tonally, it’s all over the place. It’s still riding the coattails of Scream, but it also aspires to be something darker. In the end, it’s neither funny nor scary, although the film’s batshit conclusion certainly has some creepy moments. The killer is signposted within the first 20 minutes, so there isn’t much of a whodunit angle here either. It’s nice to see Brittany Murphy again, a tragic reminder that she was taken from us too soon, and Biehn admirably does more than just turn up and collect a paycheck, but this is undoubtedly a bad film. The fact that director Geoffrey Wright also brought us the ultra-violent Australian classic Romper Stomper and a completely forgotten version of Macbeth starring Sam Worthington probably tells us everything we need to know about just how strange an experience Cherry Falls is.
In the annals of ’90s slashers, Cherry Falls deserves to be mentioned as part of the movement, and I’m glad that I revisited it, but it really is a terrible ramshackle little film. I’m almost speechless. Apart from the 300 or so words that preceded this one, I am speechless. What a mental film.