PepSquad

Pep Squad (1998)

I think this is supposed to be a hip horror comedy from director Steve Balderson. Then again he might have meant this to be a dark comedy. Either way it just doesn’t work for me, but more on that later. Be warned spoilers to follow.

The setup up here a group of girls that are competing to be homecoming queen, but when the finalists are announced and a girl named Cherry isn’t on the list there is hell to pay. Cherry starts to pick the girls on the list off one at a time, either by running them down or taking them out in a drive by shooting (hilarious isn’t it?). There is a 2nd story about an out cast girl named Beth that is befriended by an artsy student and her boyfriend, who happens to be the president of the student body. They end up kidnapping and killing the school principal, who is admittedly quite creepy. They are blackmailed by one of the girls who wants to be prom queen (she saw them kidnap and then kill the principal). They also enlist the aid of Cherry, because I suppose they can find her while the police can’t. She has been running and gunning down fellow students in plain sight of everyone. All the plotlines eventually converge and are resolved at prom.

Unfortunately it takes a very long 90 plus minutes to get to the end of the movie. I’m a big fan of movies like Heathers and Pump up the Volume. I’m not sure if Pep Squad is trying to be like those movies or is trying to make fun of those kind of teen angst black comedies. As I’ve already said either way it doesn’t work for me. I’ve used this line before in a review, but is so appropriate here that I have to use it again. Have you ever seen the guy at a party that is trying so hard to be cool but ends up looking really dumb? That is this movie. It is populated by too hip for their own good characters that spew out dialogue written by a writer in his 30s that thinks he knows what all the “cool” kids would be saying, but is really quite clueless. The plot is very silly and has way too many characters for it’s own good. Had the movie spent it’s time on Cherry or Beth and her friends it might have made more sense or worked better. That is if they had taken the time to flesh those stories out that is. As it is we get a lot of throw away characters doing dumb things to each other that aren’t interesting or entertaining in anyway. Again this makes for a very long 90 minutes.

I also wanted to point out that Pep Squad kind of annoyed me in it’s utter lack of originality. You have the out of control killer taking out the popular kids, which with a gender change is really familiar (the already mentioned Heathers from 1989). Also the director, Steve Balderson, is clearly getting his John Waters on here with the look of some of the characters. In particular the hair style, fashion sense, and even the shall we say body type of the actress who plays Terra, Amy Kelly, is right in line with any numbers of Mr. Waters films. When a bad filmmaker, and looking at Pep Squad I’m comfortable calling Balderson bad, tries to homage much better filmmakers and movies it just shows how inferior their movies are.

Just in case you haven’t’ gotten it yet I’m not recommending Pep Squad. It isn’t anywhere near the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but it is uninspired and tedious. Worse yet it is really boring. If you are still interested head over to the Troma website at http://www.troma.com/ for more information.

1 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer