Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #142 Cherry Falls (2000)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.
I’ve been writing about the films of Kitaen and Gayheart in chronological order but out of deference to this spookiest of months I skipped ahead to Scream 2 and Urban Legend in my rambling through Gayheart’s filmography.
I’ve covered a whole bunch of fright flicks for this obscenely generous patron for a very simple reason: I desperately need the money. Hoo boy, do I ever desperately need the money! Think back to the brokest you’ve ever been: that’s how broke I am now.
I’m so broke that for a relatively modest amount of money you can pretty much run my professional life for extended periods of time by determining what movies I see and write about for this site. The kind soul who commissioned the Kitaen and Gayheart series has paid me to write about Scream 2 and Urban Legend for Shoctober but also Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, Disturbing Behavior and now Cherry Falls, yet another post-Scream teen slasher movie with a meta-textual twist.
Slasher movies have a long, sordid, sleazy history of combining casual sex with mass murder. At the heart of the blood-soaked genre lies an unexpected but pervasive puritanism: horny teenagers are forever being punished harshly for fornicating outside the bonds of marriage by getting hacked to pieces with a machete.
The Final Girl who outlives her hornier friends and makes it to the end of the movie usually earns this honor by abstaining from the corrupting influences of sex and drugs and gleeful teenage debauchery.
Cherry Falls turns this time-worn trope (there’s even a nifty 2015 meta-horror movie called The Final Girls built upon this convention) on its head by presenting an upside-down world where being a virgin can get a teenager brutally murdered and losing your virginity can save your life.
The wonderful Brittany Murphy, who could so much with so little, lends her trademark sweetness and innate likability to the lead role of Jody Marken, a teenager in the suggestively named small town of Cherry Falls (it’s right next to Virginity Lost and Purity Defiled) who has been fighting off her boyfriend’s sexual advances for a solid year.
Then Brent Marken (Michael Biehn), Jody’s Sheriff father discovers that a mysterious lunatic has been brutally murdering teenagers and carving “Virgin” on their corpses as a spooky signature of sorts.
The cops quickly determine that all of the women killed were, in fact, virgins, after apparently ruling out the possibility that the mad slasher was sheepishly confessing to being a virgin himself, an Incel from Hell, as it were.
Jody and her sad-eyed single father have a creepily incestuous bond. There’s an excruciatingly uncomfortable scene where the concerned Sheriff asks his daughter exactly how far she’s gone sexually with her boyfriend without revealing that the answer to that intensely inappropriate question could literally be a matter of life and death.
For the sake of preventing the deaths of other virgins, the Sheriff makes the questionable choice to go public with everything he knows and informs the world, including everyone at the high school, that the slaughtered students had never known the sensual ecstasy of sexual intercourse.
The Sheriff is doing it for public safety and to save lives, I suppose, but I imagine that some of the dead teenagers would die all over again of embarrassment if it became public knowledge that they’d never had sex.
These horrible slayings have a HUGE upside to much of the student body however: the killing of virgins, and only virgins, gives these horny teenagers what little excuse they need to try to get laid as if their very lives depend on it because, in a neat twist, in this case they actually might.
Being horny teenagers, they are not dignified or subtle about the unexpected connection between knocking boots and avoiding gruesome death. In a particularly crass moment of sexed-up excitement, the scared, horny kids chant irreverently, “Hail, hail Virgin High, Drop Your Pants and Fuck or Die!”
Things become so absurdly virgin-friendly in Cherry Falls that at a climactic Fuck Party a character played by DJ Qualls is able to successfully seduce a classmate into sex with the pick-up line, “Have you ever played Death Quake?”
To its credit, Cherry Falls depicts sex as something men and women both desire, if not quite equally. It’s weirdly sex-positive that way.
The androgynous killer in Cherry Falls wears a black wig that would veer into Cousin Itt territory if it were any longer. The length of the wig obscures the identity of the killer but also proves distractingly impractical. It’s amazing the deranged slasher can see anything with all that synthetic hair covering their face. I’m surprised the killer doesn’t accidentally stab themself over and over again in confusion.
But who could the mystery murderer be? Could it be Jody’s horny ex, looking to scare Jody into losing her virginity to him? Or could it be Jody’s shifty-eyed, suspicious-seeming father, who does in fact turn out to have a dark secret related to the murders? Is Mr. Marliston (Jay Mohr), a sensitive teacher Jody has a crush on, to blame for all the bloodshed? Alternately, could Jody herself be behind the killings?
In her quest to find out more about the possible killer, Jody heads to the library for a fixture of 1980s and 1990s horror movies that technology, particularly internet search engines, has killed off: that thrilling sequence where the hero discovers clues by diligently searching through microfiche of old newspapers containing long-forgotten but vitally important information.
Like seemingly every teen slasher movie released post-1996, Cherry Falls owes a distinct debt to Scream, particularly in its conception of the “rules” of slasher movies but it’s redolent of Heathers as well in its tart, slangy depiction of a bleak high school universe where everyone is a monster of some sort, not just the killer.
Cherry Falls is at once a very dark comedy about a high school where losing your virginity as quickly as possible suddenly becomes everyone’s foremost preoccupation and a dreamy melodrama about oblivious progeny being forced to pay the ultimate price for the sins of their fathers and the silence of their mothers.
When I reviewed Cherry Falls for the A.V Club when it was released direct-to-video back in 2000 I deemed it insufficiently scary or funny but I found a lot more to like about it this time around, from the dreamy mood to the singular combination of toughness and vulnerability that Murphy brings to the role.
Murphy really was something special. I remember interviewing her at the Girl, Interrupted junket and being struck by how sweet and unaffected and child-like she was. I vividly remember thinking, “This industry is going to eat this poor girl alive.”
I was only twenty-two or twenty-three at the time but I could already sense that Murphy was too pure for our corrupt and degraded world. It’s a goddamn tragedy that Murphy had to battle monsters and demons and horrible, toxic men onscreen and off, and ultimately ended up losing everything at an age when she still had so much left to give.
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