The seventh entry in the long-running Bring It On franchise is this Syfy Original produced slasher sequel Bring It On: Cheer Or Die (2022) directed by Karen Lam (The Curse of Willow Song) and co-scripted by Rebekah McKendry (Glorious) and Dana Schwartz (She-Hulk: Attorney at Law). It kicks of 2002 during a cheer competition, and through some mean girl shenanigans on the Diablo Highschool cheer squad a highschooler named Sandra ends up breaking her neck during the competition. Twenty years later at Diablo risky cheer stunts have been banned by overly cautious Principal Simmons (Missi Pyle, Galaxy Quest), but co-cheer captains Abby (Kerry Medders, Promised Land) and McKayla (Tiera Skovbye) have big plans for the upcoming regional cheer competition, secretly spending the weekend in the old abandoned highschool to choreograph and rehearse an acrobatic winning routine with their cheer squad, which includes Mateo (Alten Wilmot), Regan (Alexandra Beaton, The Hardy Boys), Jackie (Sierra Holder, Y: The Last Man), stoner Quincy (Sam Robert Muik), Tori (Erika Prevost) and Paige (Marlowe Zimmerman), who is the principal's daughter.
Once they get to the abandoned highschool and start practicing their cheer routines one by one the cheerleaders begin to disappear, and soon they realize that someone has chained the doors shut, and now they're locked inside the school with a killer wearing the school's devil mascot costume, dispatching the teens in a myriad of ways that includes archery, throwing daggers, suffocation by pom-pom, and my personal favorite strangulation by blood pressure cuff!
I've never watched any of the other Bring It On flicks, I have no interest in revisiting them either, but the good news is you don'ts have to be familiar with them to watch this slasher-comedy reboot of sorts, it stands on it's own. The premise brought to mind those 80's 'a few years later' slashers like Slaughter High, The Prowler, Prom Night, Terror Train wherein a killer shows up to punish people for something that happened years earlier, it's not all that original, even the killer wearing a school mascot uniform has been done quite a bit in stuff like Varsity Blood, Famine and Girls Nite Out, so originality is not the strong suit here, Unfortunately n either are the kills, most are bloodless and some happen offscreen, this might be due to it being a SyFy original, so all the kills are neutered, which is a huge mark against the slasher-comedy. Now as a Bring It On sequel it's got plenty of cheer to it, more than I would have wanted to be honest, and some cheer moves even come into plays a defense maneuvers when battling the slasher baddie, so that was at least a bit fun. The flick is pretty obviously low-budget, but it does have some nice moody and shadowy lighting that at least looks good.
I thought the line deliveries were pretty hokey and often awkwardly wooden, but at least everyone seems to be on the same page, this is a jokey flick and the performances are in line with that, lots of one-liners here, not all of them hit home, some come down with a hollow thud even. The script is pretty smart but not overly clever, there's some obvious red-herrings throughout from the meathead ex to a stalker-ish weirdo, and I am a bit ashamed to say that I didn't actually see the main twist of it coming. The whole thing has a very '80's slasher vibe about it, it's just too bad it wasn't made back in '81 and loaded with gore, this could have been a fun Cheerleader Camp sort of slasher but as it is it's pretty neutered, but still managed to be cornball and fun, but at the end of the day this is a one and done for me.
