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VARSITY BLOOD

(IMAGE ENTERTAINMENT/DAVED PRODUCTIONS/FLASHBACK FILMS (86 minutes/Unrated); 2014)

VARSITY BLOOD

What a strange little film this one is! VARSITY BLOOD is part slasher flick, part PORKY’S style teenage hijinks (with far fewer yucks) and ALL genre farce. While there’s stuff to like about this movie, it has definite problems, chief among them the cardboard acting performances from the majority of the cast (most of the kids and all of the adults). We’ll hit on the other major problem with this one a little later in the review but, first, let’s set the scene for VARSITY BLOOD, shall we?

VARSITY BLOOD (Kiarra Hogan, Natalie Peyton, Elle LaMont, Elyse Bigler and Lexi Giovagnol) (publicity still)
VARSITY BLOOD (Kiarra Hogan, Natalie Peyton, Elle LaMont, Elyse Bigler and Lexi Giovagnol) (publicity still)

The movie starts – as all good slasher movies should – with a bunch of jocks terrorizing the school mascot and a gaggle of cheerleader being mean to each other and even nastier to those they deem beneath them, which is most of the student body and all of the faculty. These kids are “Warriors,” so the mascot is in Native American dress and carries a tomahawk, a bow and arrows; the big paper mache head the kid has to wear (part Indian war paint, part demented gorilla clown) is enough to give you nightmares, if the snotty cheer squad hasn’t already. Of course, it’s Halloween… it’s always Halloween, right? The bad stuff that leads to THIS bad stuff happened the previous Halloween; apparently, the Warriors only play football on Halloween night, regardless of what day of the week it happens to fall on. There was, of course, underage drinking; tomfoolery was definitely afoot. As the testosterone and alcohol fueled players tossed the football around – in a ritualistic and time-honored chest-thumping pageantry performed to get the female of the species to “ooh” and “aah” and giggle into their hand – the cheerleaders, in like-minded plumage-preening pageantry, were attempting a dangerous pyramid stunt. As is often the case (particularly in the scripted reality of movies and television), a football toss goes awry and a pyramid crumbles, leaving the principal‘s daughter (who quite conveniently, as head cheerleader, was atop the pyramid) in an irrevocable state of… death. She was dead; kaput; bereft of life, she would stunt no more. The kid who threw the errant pigskin suffers serious mental deficiencies (in a blank-eyed, non-verbal kind of way) and is placed in a facility for serious mental deficiency sufferers.

VARSITY BLOOD (Blair Jackson, Lexi Giovagnoli, Melody Herron and Peyton Wood) (publicity still)
VARSITY BLOOD (Blair Jackson, Lexi Giovagnoli, Melody Herron and Peyton Wood) (publicity still)

Fast forward to this Halloween and a pep rally for the big game. The principal scowls at the players and the cheerleaders and, as he recounts the awesomeness of his defunct offspring, the mascot draws an arrow, nocks it and let’s fly. The intended target? The principal? One of his bubba-like tormentors? The head cheerleader? Of course not! That would be too easy, wouldn’t it? He shoots high above the gym floor, hitting a large cache of orange and black (school colors, don’t you know) confetti. Post-game plans are made to sneak off to a – wait for it! – an abandoned farmhouse deep in the woods, for a little drinking and even more poking and prodding of the opposite sex. The new/chaste girl, Hannah (Lexi Giovagnoli, one of a couple of fairly decent actors, in – unfortunatelya fairly interchangeable role), is forbidden to go but, then, we all knew that she would, right? The token (sorry, but there’s no better term for the character) black cheerleader (and daughter of the unimaginably clueless sheriff) bemoans the fact that she will be the only one without a hookup because the town falls pitifully short on its “brothers” quotient. Other goofy moments that add to the farcical homage to ’80s slasher flicks: The word “chaps” is used by one of the kids to describe the other males in the group; three members of the party are snorting cocaine (is that even a thing anymore?); when the first party-goer is murdered not fifteen feet from the others, do the geniuses take the four steps to their vehicles to get the heck out of there? Of course not! They run into the abandoned house, light a bunch of candles and kerosene lamps and cover all the windows… because nothing says, “Ain’t no one here!,” better than sheets on a window. In a spectacular demonstration of calm-under-pressure, they do somehow manage to secure all of the beer and coke… but, you know, just to take the edge off. By the way, this is probably as good a time as any to confirm the suspicions of such comedians as Chris Rock and the great, sorely missed Patrice O’Neal: That first dead camper was – Duh! Duh! Duh! – the token black cheerleader. And I was really rooting for her, too! Talk about a twist ending, huh? The only black kid in a hundred miles is the one to outsmart the murderer and survives the decapitations, bisections by truck, pitchforkings and toilet drownings to appear in the inevitable sequel. Ohhhh… wait! Yeah, it’s probably best that she died, ’cause if she HAD survived, she woulda moved to someplace safe. Like Detroit. Then, who would the sequel focus on?

VARSITY BLOOD (Wesley Scott, Elyse Bigler, Kiarra Hogan, Lexi Giovagnoli, Blair Jackson, Melody Herron and Peyton Wood) (publicity still)
VARSITY BLOOD (Wesley Scott, Elyse Bigler, Kiarra Hogan, Lexi Giovagnoli, Blair Jackson, Melody Herron and Peyton Wood) (publicity still)

So, anyway, even though there are no Muffys, Buffys or Biffs in VARSITY BLOOD, there is a Blaine and a Bubba, the latter of which is comatose for much of the movie, then he gets hit on the head and loses consciousness. Thankfully, he comes to just in time to save the… Oops! Sorry, Bubba. You really shouldn’t be sneaking up on chaste cheerleaders who are armed with big butcher knives, trying not to be victim number… whatever of a killer in a mascot costume. Man, this slasher has it good! His victims are picking themselves off!

VARSITY BLOOD (Natalie Peyton) (publicity still)
VARSITY BLOOD (Natalie Peyton) (publicity still)

The sheriff finally gets a clue – actually two clues: First, the kid from last Halloween has escaped from the institution where he has been housed since the principal’s daughter was killed and, second, an old lady called in a complaint about young’uns harassing her (one of the girls escapes and tries to get help, knocking on the lady’s door). The sheriff pulls up to the abandoned house, hears the kids yelling for help because there’s a crazy killer picking them off one at a time and replies, in true adult-in-a-slasher-movie fashion, something that amounts to, “Yeah… okay… I don’t have time to worry about that now… where’s my little girl?” At which point, the killer speaks: “Right here, sheriff. Under my feet!” A great line that would have sounded way more menacing if the actor delivering it was even half way good. Or, as has been speculated elsewhere, maybe these performances are purposely lousy, adding to the ’80s cheese-factor. I’ll leave that one up to you to decide after watching VARSITY BLOOD yourself. So, let’s recap, shall we? There are, by my count, at least seven possible choices for slasher du jour, including the principal’s daughter (I never count out the dead people in one of these things… Jason Voorhees, anyone?). Pretty much everyone you’d expect to die (and a few others, just for good measure), does. And, finally, after the reveal of the slasher’s identity (a real bait and switch, but one I’d actually thought of and dismissed as too much of a stretch), there are still some bodies – alive or otherwise – unaccounted for, virtually guaranteeing a sequel.

VARSITY BLOOD (publicity still)
VARSITY BLOOD (publicity still)

As far as slasher movies go, VARSITY BLOOD is definitely one. How good of one, again, I’ll leave up to you. I mentioned earlier that I had one more major complaint about this flick. Here it is: When the sun goes down and the lights are off (or, in most cases, nonexistent) this is one dark movie! Now, I’m not talking about gloomy, spooky, Gothicy dark; I’m talking full-on can’t see your hands in front of your face dark. I thought it may have been the settings on my TV, so I turned the brightness all the way up and, though it helped a bit, most of the killings and pretty much everything that happens in and around the old farmhouse are fairly well blacked out. It looks like writer/director Jake Helgren was intent on using only “natural” lighting, ie: The moon, the candles, the campfire. Maybe you’ll have better luck with the brightness control than I did… if you’ve got the guts to watch this one all the way through. You can take that last statement any way you like; I am not here to judge you (only the movies you watch).