Main cast: Kerri Medders (Abby Synger), Tiera Skovbye (McKayla Miller) and Missi Pyle (Principal Simmons)
Director: Karen Lam
Now, while I really enjoyed Bring It On, I deliberately stayed away from the sequels because from what I hear and read, they are just the same thing that were redone over and over with increasingly no-name cast members and an increasingly reduced budget to the point that the last few sequels looked like they were shot in a school hall or something. That’s what I heard anyway.
However, Bring It On: Cheer or Die, the seventh—seventh!—sequel takes things on a different route: it’s said to be a slasher film, so I’m intrigued. Give it to me, I’ll give it a watch.
Okay, the whole thing still looks like they rented a school hall and paid some cheerleading coach from the same school to help with cheer routines, but perhaps I’ll get some good kills and thrills to make up for it. Right?
Basically, this one is about the Diablos. Abby Synger, the cheer team leader, is frustrated when the school forbids them from doing stunts and routines that could lead to injuries and worse. How will they win the upcoming regional when all they could do is safe, tame, lame stuff? They will be laughed out of the competition!
They all decide to practice their routine in secret, at an abandoned school, and surprise, the school may not be as abandoned as they think…
Sadly, it doesn’t matter if there had been a killer or not in this one, because the slasher elements barely matter here aside from being a gimmick to give this movie some kind of way to differentiate itself from the previous sequels. The body count is dreadfully disappointing, the kills are… wait, are there even kills? There is hardly any blood due to its PG-13 rating.
I did some research after watching this thing, and it turns out that this thing was meant for a Halloween release, hence the tacked on “horror” elements that are anything but.
Unfortunately, there is not much else to make up for this feeling of being cheated and lied to. The characters are all forgettable walking tropes, there is hardly any one-liners that work, and the characters all do stupid standard horror movie dumb-dumb acts without any hint of irony or self awareness to make these acts palatable.
Most of these characters don’t even try to survive. Oh, the killer is here, guess it’s just time to die now, bye. Something tells me nobody involved in this thing is even trying.
Really, I have no idea what the point of this absolutely joyless and pointless thing is. Clearly, someone has some spare change to waste and a streaming service needs something, anything to fill its slot, so I guess this one may as well be it. I’d think they could at least try to make things fun, but I guess that’s too much work when it comes to money laundering or whatever this thing is made for,
