Cherry Falls

Alphabet, the company that owns Google, has had one good idea, and that’s Google itself. Virtually all their other high profile ideas have crashed and burned. Google+, Google Glass, Google Hangouts, Google Stadia, all failures. One time, they got it right, and ever since, they’ve floundered to repeat that success. That’s Cherry Falls. It has one good idea, being its core concept: flipping the slasher trope on its head by having the killer target virgins. There’s a lot that could be done with that. Cherry Falls (get it? Because … oh never mind) is content with just having that idea and hanging the worst, most dated, most cliched, and most nonsensical slasher movie on it. The acting here is terrible. Nobody knows what movie they’re in. Some actors play it straight, some go for camp, and then there’s a few who I’m not sure are even trying to resemble human, especially Brittany Murphy, who is all over the damned map here. I’m convinced the dialogue was run through seven different languages in a translator before being brought back to English. Nobody speaks like a real human being at any point, and it’s not in a cheesy B-movie way, or a painfully hipster Diablo Cody way; it’s just … not human. Awkward. Like a kid that’s physically grown up too fast for their age, so they look ungainly and uncoordinated. The language version of that is this movie’s dialogue. Behind the camera is no better. When the direction isn’t using the worst late 90’s/early 2000’s filmmaking techniques like low-frame-rate slow motion, it can’t decide want tone it wants to take and when to do it, but it’s always the wrong decision. The score makes it worse by being so ill-fitting, it undermines the attempt at a tone. Plot inconsistencies? Yeah, we got those too, like portraying the killer as one gender, but then pulling the final act reveal and it’s the other gender, despite that contradicting several moments of the movie. And then there’s the kills. Except, what kills? Every one of them — EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM — is off screen. There’s still a lot of blood and gore, but it’s either backsplash or the aftermath. How does this movie have anything close to a positive reputation? What are people seeing that I’m not? I’m just not getting it. I keep seeing that this movie is clever and satirical and fun, one of the best post-Scream slashers. No, it is not. This is like a hair metal album released after Nirvana broke big. This is the dying gasp of a fad trying in vain to postpone the inevitable.