A teenage couple is killed while making out by the lake in small town Cherry Falls. A further murder points the police to suspect that someone is killing virgins. While the towns' teenagers prepare for a sex party to protect themselves, the sheriff's daughter, Jody Marken, follows a clue that may unmask the killer and her motives.
One of the spate of `knowing' teenage slasher movies, Cherry Falls got some publicity from it's twist on the usual horror cliché that `sex = death'. Pointed out in Scream, whenever you have sex in a horror movie you mark yourself out as a victim, however here the twist is that virgins will die and those having had sex will live. The film is quite enjoyable and has the odd tense moment, but quickly falls into line with every other horror cliché in the book right down to the big twist over the killer's identity and, true to Scream, it's a big leap!
The film is a little modern ironic but doesn't get much mileage out of it. More interesting to me was the angle that, in this day of AIDS and STD's, those HAVING sex were actually protected while those saving themselves and being careful were actually risking death. I'm not sure if this angle was thought of when making the film but it didn't get any significant air time or comment I guess the film only wanted to be ironic or post modern if it didn't involve any thought or effort. That said it still sort of works, even if it doesn't really stand out from the rest of the teen slashers (but then, what does?).
The cast are so-so. Murphy is OK in the lead and Biehn is a familiar face as her father. Jay Mohr has a small role but happily isn't awful. The rest of the teens tend to fall into high school stereotypes of jock, nerd, joker etc and only really serve to be victims rather than characters. There are no really gory moments but there are lots of quite cruel ones which happen just offscreen but are no less horrific for it.
Overall the film is OK but can't really do anything intelligent with it's unique twist. I knew it was clever to do things like this, but the film gets no mileage out of the wider ideals (AIDS etc) and quickly falls into being a standard teen horror movie complete with shadows, twisty end and so on. Still worth a watch if you like this sort of stuff but it really could have been better than this.
