Cherry Falls - Il paese del male

This movie is great, and quite underrated. I am a huge horror fan and also a fan of the recent "teen slasher movies" and Cherry Falls deserves to be up there with the Screams of this world. The whole "killing virgins" thing is totally original in this genre, as the great Randy Meeks said "sex equals death" so Cherry Falls goes totally against the rules. All in all I would give this a 9 rating because the acting is fresh and the script is sharp. Long live the Teen Slasher Flick!!!!!

Great fun both to see Brittany Murphy and to see this flick. It's like a comedy visual with a drama soundtrack. A serial slasher targets teen virgins in small town high school USA. In an attempt to thwart the killer all the kiddies have a deflowering fete which, I gotta say affords some of THE BEST stampede scenes.

The success of the `Scream' series spawned many clones, this being a reasonable attempt. The makers of such scream clones were obviously faced with a dilemma, how not to stray too far from a winning formula – yet be original at the same time – therefore in this one they give the story a little twist. Here, the preposterous twist is that the killer only kills virgins! – sending the youths in the local village sex mad - in order to save their life, obviously!!.

As bad as it sounds, its not all bad, especially when the absolutely delicious Brittany Murphy is the lead role as the daughter of the local sheriff (Michael Biehn) who is investigating these grisly murders – and guess what, she's a virgin!!. The final twist is pretty good, although if you really think about, the killers motive for hating all virgins isn't really that convincing, Fun though if you take it for what it is, enjoyable rubbish!!

In the small town of Cherry Falls a masked murderer is killing off the virgins of the local high school.

The cast was decent if not quite A-list: Jay Mohr as a teacher, a post-Clueless Brittany Murphy as the female lead (and sheriff's daughter), and genre favorite Michael Biehn.

AllMovie gave it a favorable review, writing, "Of all the teen slasher flicks that premiered after the wildly successful Scream series (Urban Legend, etc.), Cherry Falls will possibly go down as one of the most creative, but sadly unseen ones in the bunch."

Although reviews were generally mixed or negative, Entertainment Weekly gave a shockingly positive one (grading the film as A-). They have labeled the picture "the wittiest, most subversive teen thriller since 'Heathers'." While I am not a fan of "Heathers", this is still high praise.

I probably would have expected more from "Romper Stomper" director Geoffrey Wright, but I guess it is a different territory. The concept was good, and they more or less succeeded in carrying a one-joke film all the way through...

A teenage couple is killed while making out by the lake in small town Cherry Falls. A further murder points the police to suspect that someone is killing virgins. While the towns' teenagers prepare for a sex party to protect themselves, the sheriff's daughter, Jody Marken, follows a clue that may unmask the killer and her motives.

One of the spate of `knowing' teenage slasher movies, Cherry Falls got some publicity from it's twist on the usual horror cliché that `sex = death'. Pointed out in Scream, whenever you have sex in a horror movie you mark yourself out as a victim, however here the twist is that virgins will die and those having had sex will live. The film is quite enjoyable and has the odd tense moment, but quickly falls into line with every other horror cliché in the book – right down to the big twist over the killer's identity and, true to Scream, it's a big leap!

The film is a little modern ironic but doesn't get much mileage out of it. More interesting to me was the angle that, in this day of AIDS and STD's, those HAVING sex were actually protected while those saving themselves and being careful were actually risking death. I'm not sure if this angle was thought of when making the film but it didn't get any significant air time or comment – I guess the film only wanted to be ironic or post modern if it didn't involve any thought or effort. That said it still sort of works, even if it doesn't really stand out from the rest of the teen slashers (but then, what does?).

The cast are so-so. Murphy is OK in the lead and Biehn is a familiar face as her father. Jay Mohr has a small role but happily isn't awful. The rest of the teens tend to fall into high school stereotypes of jock, nerd, joker etc and only really serve to be victims rather than characters. There are no really gory moments but there are lots of quite cruel ones which happen just offscreen but are no less horrific for it.

Overall the film is OK but can't really do anything intelligent with it's unique twist. I knew it was clever to do things like this, but the film gets no mileage out of the wider ideals (AIDS etc) and quickly falls into being a standard teen horror movie complete with shadows, twisty end and so on. Still worth a watch if you like this sort of stuff but it really could have been better than this.