Who Is Killing the Cheerleaders? (Storyteller Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday Charles and I watched what I hope is the last “new” cheerleader-themed movie on Lifetime, Who Is Killing the Cheerleaders? This is a production from Georgia-based Storyteller Films, released to Lifetime through Reel One Entertainment and directed by Jeff Hare (a familiar Lifetime name) from a script by Lauren Balson Carter (whom I haven’t heard of before). What’s amusing about this movie is how many Lifetime tropes it hooks, including the woman who returns to the small town (called Mosier) where she grew up and takes a job teaching advanced placement English at Mosier High School. Ten years earlier a psycho killer knocked off virtually the whole school’s cheerleading squad, stabbing them to death and writing anti-cheerleading slogans on their bodies with the victims’ own blood. The crime was never solved, and Mosier in general and its high school in particular have suffered a kind of collective post-traumatic stress disorder ever since.

Our Heroine is Ellie Oliver (Ella Cannon), who has just returned to Mosier after leaving high school 10 years earlier as the only member of the school’s cheerleading squad who survived -- though she still bears the scars from the killer’s unsuccessful attempt to off her. The main reason she’s returned is to look after her mother Linda (Frances Dell Bendert), who’s just been diagnosed with cancer. But Ellie (short for “Elliette,” according to the imdb.com cast listing, though it sounded like “Elliott” to me -- hey, if you can have women named Alex and Sam, why not one named Elliott?) also lands a job at the local high school and offers to re-start the cheerleading team, which for obvious reasons has been in abeyance since the catastrophe a decade earlier. Ellie starts out with only four potential cheerleaders, and ends up with even fewer as the girls on the squad keep getting abducted and posed in the same positions as the original bodies -- only this time they’re not actually killed and the blood they’re painted with is pig’s blood. (I guess Mosier is supposed to be a sufficiently agricultural community pig’s blood is easy to come by, though I also couldn’t help but be reminded that in Shakespeare’s day actors wore bladders filled with pig’s blood so that when another character was supposed to stab them, they would bleed on cue -- an interesting forerunner to the “blood packs” modern-day actors wear that explode and spurt out blood on cue.)

I’ll say one thing for Lauren Balson Carter: she certainly knows how to write this sort of formula whodunit and in particular how to create a wide range of suspects -- even though, like Agatha Christie (the foremother of this sort of mystery writing), she’s not all that great about motives. Among the potential suspects are Dr. Jonathan Colton (Austin Freeman), a fellow high school student of Ellie’s to whom she’s attracted now even though she wouldn’t give him the time of day then; Forrest Parker (Greg Corbett), a fellow teacher who dated one of the cheerleaders who was killed way back when and, after she died, married her twin sister Brooke but is now planning to cheat on her with one of his students, Chloe Carter (Grace Patterson), who’s also a member of Ellie’s cheerleading squad; Ellie’s friend Zoe Trudell, who hated cheerleaders way back when; another woman named Lisbeth (Kayla Fields); and the person I guessed it was going to be, Dr. Bridget Whiting (Wendy Wynne), the town’s therapist, whom Ellie sees in hopes that Whiting’s therapy can unlock her repressed memories of the attack on her. I thought she might be the killer if only because I’ve seen other Lifetime movies with killer therapists motivated to kill their clients simply because they got tired of hearing about their piddling little problems all day and wanted to show them what real pain was like.

Through much of the movie Ellie is victimized by random break-ins at her home (when Gavin, the tall, bald Black man who seems to be Mosier’s only law enforcement officer, interrogates Ellie and asks why she doesn’t lock her doors, that just seemed like simple good sense to me and helped make up for the character’s otherwise clueless attitude towards the mystery) in which pom-poms and other relics of her cheerleading days are moved around and her cell phone keeps disappearing and reappearing. Gradually -- after Forrest is arrested and then released (his creepy attempted assignation with Chloe was just writer Carter’s way of making him a red herring) -- Ellie realizes she herself is being framed both for the contemporary crimes and the bloodbath of 10 years previously.

Charles wondered why she didn’t surround her bed with mousetraps -- “or,” I said, referencing The Maltese Falcon, “crumpled newspapers on the floor, so no one could sneak silently into her room” -- and it turns out that Carter did indeed rip off The Maltese Falcon for her ending, in which [spoiler alert!] it turns out that the real criminal is Dr. Jonathan Colton (so it’s the woman finding out that the guilty party is her boyfriend -- The Maltese Falcon with the genders reversed), who killed all the cheerleaders way back then because he wasn’t one of the “cool kids” and the cheerleaders laughed at him when he asked them for dates -- sort of like the modern-day “incel” movement in which young straight men can’t find willing partners for sex and take out their frustration online by posting nasty attacks on women generally (as well as the men women are willing to date) and sometimes, as in Santa Barbara a few years ago, end up as mass spree killers targeting people more attractive than they. (I remember writing about the “incels” -- the term is short for “involuntarily celibate” -- a few years ago that I felt sorry that people can’t arbitrarily change their sexual orientation; a lot of “incels” I’ve seen photos of may strike out with women but they’d probably do very well in a Gay bar.)

Director Hare stages the flashbacks effectively as stream-of-consciousness shots with what the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew once jokingly called a “Dizzicam,” and the final revelation in which Ellie realizes that she saw Jonathan’s face under the obligatory (for a Lifetime killer) black hoodie just before he killed her friend and tried to attack her, only to be scared into fleeing by the sound of a police siren, is a quite effectively done shock scene. There are no especially cute guys here -- one reason the story fooled me is that when a relatively young male is the villain Lifetime usually looks for a far more gorgeous actor than the rather nerdy Austin Freeman … though maybe they figured a hotter actor in the role wouldn’t have been believable as an “incel”) -- and, while there aren’t any outright bad performances here as there were in Cheerleader Abduction and The Wrong Cheerleader Coach, there aren’t any particularly good ones either (though Grace Patterson has a nice combination of innocence and sleaze that suits her role as the would-be nymphet).

Overall Who Is Killing the Cheerleaders? Is an O.K. movie that suffers from the lack of truly multidimensional characters -- Ellie is accused of a series of murders in which she was actually an intended victim, and all she can muster is a rather peeved sense of annoyance -- which was the main problem with Agatha Christie’s writing, too.