Coming on the heels of the post-Scream slasher movie renaissance, director Geoffrey Wright’s 2000 effort Cherry Falls had a difficult journey to find an audience. Rejected for an R rating by the MPAA despite several rounds of cuts, the movie was unable to secure theatrical distribution and wound up premiering in an even more truncated form in the States on the USA Network in 2000 (it received a theatrical release overseas). Over the course of the next 15 years, though, the movie developed a well-deserved cult audience who recognized it for being one of the better slashers to come out of that second wave.
Someone is killing teenagers in Cherry Falls, Virginia. Sheriff Brent Marken (Michael Biehn) is desperate to catch the killer and protect his teenage daughter Jody (Brittany Murphy). She’s just broken up with her boyfriend (Gabriel Mann) and is feeling particularly vulnerable—even more so when she and the rest of the town learn that the killer is targeting virgins. The plan, then, is simple: organize an orgy for every virgin in high school and remove the targets from their backs.
The central inversion at the heart of Cherry Falls—instead of killing off promiscuous teenagers as horror fans have seen in countless other slashers, this time around the only way to stay alive is to have sex—is clever enough to carry the movie over some of its rough spots. There are only one or two characters worth liking or caring about, none more so than Brittany Murphy, a truly unique screen presence who tragically died far too young, before we ever got to see her best work. Casting Murphy as the heroine of a slasher like this is an inspired choice, as she has an edgy weirdness that gives the movie its own energy—she’s not like most final girls, and her performance is just one more way the film upends slasher conventions.
Beyond her and the always excellent Michael Biehn (plus Jay Mohr in a memorable role as a high school teacher), most of the characters in Cherry Falls are of the obnoxious, frosted-tips late ’90s school of writing teenagers; their dialogue is meant to be witty in a way that apes what Kevin Williamson was doing at the time, but mostly comes off as flat and bratty. It’s the kind of stuff that dates the movie.
For as great as the central conceit is, the screenplay by Ken Selden doesn’t explore it with as much depth as one might like—at least, not in this heavily compromised version. The orgy gives the film its marketing hook and sets the stage for a climactic set piece, but ends up informing very little of what actually happens in the movie, which is in many ways a somewhat standard high school slasher. The characters are thin, the kills uninspired, the tension and scares lacking overall. It’s the flashes of personality that peek through— whether it’s Brittany Murphy’s performance, Wright’s twisted direction, or a pretty outrageous finale—that distinguish Cherry Falls from the I Know What You Did Last Summers and Valentines of the period.
It’s hard to tell what the original Cherry Falls might have been like, as Wright reportedly included a whole lot of nasty graphic violence and more explicit sexuality in his first cut of the movie. It’s unfortunate that we never got to see that version of the film—and likely never will—as it sounds like the movie Cherry Falls needed to be in order to realize its full potential. Rather than being self-referential in the way that, say, Scream had been just a few years earlier, Cherry Falls attempts to comment on the slasher genre by pushing many of its conventions to extreme places, not just implying a link between sex and violence but making the connection textual and deliberate. It works enough for the film to stand out as being quirky, nasty fun, but there is promise of something much greater.
The biggest disappointment around Scream Factory’s new Blu-ray of Cherry Falls is that they were unable to secure the uncut version of the movie (which hasn’t appeared on home video in the US and is hard to come by; it’s possible that the original elements no longer exist), meaning this is the same R-rated cut fans have seen on the long out of print DVD. The 1080p transfer is decent, looking like an old HD master from the early days of the format. Dark scenes (of which there are many) rarely succumb to any crush issues and colors appear natural throughout. Director Wright has recorded a new commentary track for the disc on which he discusses some of the challenges in making the movie (many of them brought on by himself) and describes some of his original plans for the uncut version.
Writer Ken Selden, producers Eli Selden and Marshall Persinger, and co-star Amanda Anka have all assembled for “Love it or Die”, a nearly 30-minute retrospective featurette in which a number of the movie’s participants discuss the production and offer a number of interesting facts (like the script being offered first to David Lynch, or how its ultimate fate made it the most expensive TV movie ever made at $14 million). Also included are some archival interviews with Murphy, Biehn, Mohr, and Wright, as well as a longer and newly recorded interview with Anka. Some behind-the-scenes footage, the trailer, and a BD-ROM copy of the original script round out the bonus features.
With the number of issues I’ve raised with the movie, it probably sounds like I don’t really like Cherry Falls, which isn’t the case. It’s a fun and witty little slasher from a time when the genre was producing a lot of them, but not many that were fun or witty. It’s a shame we won’t see what could have been. In the meantime, we can be happy with what we have.
Movie score: 3/5, Disc score: 3/5
Patrick lives in Chicago, where he has been writing about film since 2004. A member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Society, Patrick's writing also appears on About.com, DVDVerdict.com and fthismovie.net, the site he runs and hosts a weekly podcast.
He has been an obsessive fan of horror and genre films his entire life, watching, re-watching and studying everything from the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s to the modern explosion of indie horror. Some of his favorites include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931), Dawn of the Dead (1978), John Carpenter's The Thing and The Funhouse. He is a lover of Tobe Hooper and his favorite Halloween film is part 4. He knows how you feel about that. He has a great wife and two cool kids, who he hopes to raise as horror nerds.
Daily Dead's Official Podcast! Daily Dead's Official Podcast!
