Varsity Blood

The low budget horror flick could've been campy and mixed horror and humor, but this highschool cheerleader and jock killing spree was just really really bad.

No matter how hard they try (or don't try) modern slashers can never seem to capture the endearingly innocent goofiness and corniness of the 78-83 era. Varsity Blood is no exception, although to be fair it does at least start in the right gear. The opening few minutes got my hopes up that I was about to witness a retro slasher homage done the right way for once (the killer looked truly hilarious and the film briefly seemed like fun), but it soon shifted gears into snooze-mode.

One of my main problems was the way almost every character garbled their lines out in such a lacklustre way that half of what they said was unintelligible. I don't mind dumb dialogue, in fact I love it, but only when I can make it out. This and the total lack of screen presence of most of the cast, and the fact the plot moved slower than an iceberg chained to a wall made me give up about half way through, which I rarely do. This wasn't insultingly annoying, but should've been much more fun than it was.

This is what the Disney Channel's version of an uncut slasher movie would be. Bad acting, characters that you wish will all get killed(except for two of them), writing that will make you cringe AND chuckle at the same time, and overall dumb and forced behavior. Watch without looking for any bit of masterful acting and you'll be fine.

This seems to be done in the same vein as Killer Movie and other C-grade slashers. As in virtually all slasher films, this has the typical boobs, butts, blood, and gore, along with cheesy dialogue. There's one girl who refers to her breasts as "bread" and "butter" because she says they'll make her a lot of money one day. I hope so, because her acting won't, at least not as she's shown in this movie. Yeah, it's done in a tongue-in-cheek type way, but I don't know if it's on purpose, or if it just read better on scrip than it sounds when spoken. "Maybe if someone had a relationship of their own, she wouldn't be so brown-nosed in everybody's s--t," which is said to a black cheerleader, and the girl's response is, "I'm sorry, was that a racial slur?" I guess the writers thought that would be clever or funny, but it was neither, just stupid. Some of the other dialogue, specifically when the "kids" are in the house making a plan to escape the killer is really funny, but I don't think it's intentional.

As for the killer mascot costume, it's more laughable than scary. The mask from Scream was scary. The mask from this movie looks like a discarded prop from the Bozo the Clown series from the early 1980s.

I'm really tired of the cliché movies, especially in horror. One of the things I'm talking about is a 1980s horror cliché of the victim running for their lives, while the killer is merely walking after them. However, the killer still manages to catch up. Silly. It's way past time we put that cliché to rest, but they use it over and over and over again in this movie. In fact, I don't believe the killer ever runs in this film. And something that's almost certainly taken from Scooby Doo is when the killer says "You meddling kids" towards the end. I had to LMAO when that was said. Speaking of the end, if the beginning and middle of the movie wasn't enough to ruin it, that end was just...STUPID with the killer explaining why this was all done.

I gave this a 3-star rating because it was entertaining because of the bad acting from most of the "kids." Even though it was bad acting, it was funny, which made it entertaining to some extent.

VARSITY BLOOD (2014) is a modern-day slasher that tries to throw back to the heyday of the genre in the 1980s but fails miserably at every turn. This is an unashamed cheapie in which a group of jocks and cheerleaders find themselves menaced by a madman dressed up in an uninspiring mascot costume. Could he or she be linked to a tragedy from the past? I won this title in a competition and ended up wishing I hadn't, because it's pitiful stuff, with bad acting and insipid storytelling. The whole plot feels borrowed from better mainstream fare like I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, and even the kills, that timeless draw for horror fans, are disappointing.