CHEERLEADER CAMP

During the summer holidays, a group of girls go to a cheerleading camp where Miss Tipton will teach them the 'hard' job of cheerleaders. Among the camp's guests is Alison, a disturbed girl who frequently has disturbing dreams, along with her friends, united as a team to win the title of best cheerleaders of the year. But it doesn't take long for the first corpses to start appearing. A mysterious serial killer, in fact, is exterminating one by one the guests of the camp. A little-known slasher from 1988 and characterized by a worrying predictability and stupidity. With 'Bloody Nightmare', an ugly and anonymous Italian title for 'Cheerleader Camp' (but it is also known as 'Bloody Pom-poms', we are in the vicinity of 'Friday the 13th', in fact we can safely insert this film in the long list of titles born by copying the successful saga conceived by Sean S. Cunningham. There is the summer camp, there is the forest, there is a mysterious killer who kills with a white weapon, in short we are in already known territories, but it also adds a touch of demented humor that should give it that extra to differentiate itself from the prototype. Unfortunately, the turn of 'Bloody Nightmare' towards territories of comedy in the style of 'Porky's' does not help it at all, on the contrary, it is probably an element that plays even more to its disadvantage. The director John Quinn, who in the future will carve out a long career almost exclusively in the field of glossy erotica and Playboy videos, begins to make the trials for the future 'unfastening' already in 'Bloody Nightmare', his debut work, putting on stage a large number of beauties often without veils and spicy scenes that aim at humor. The style is, however, flat, very televisual, comparable to contemporary direct to video, to which are added also a series of actors less than mediocre (penalized also by the Italian dubbing, it must be said!) left to loose rein and often visibly disoriented. The only minimally known faces are the protagonist Betsy Russell, whom horror fans today know as Jill, Jigsaw's wife in the 'Saw' saga, the singer Leif Garrett (here far from his Bee Hive look) and Buck Flower, a recently deceased character actor specializing in roles of homeless people and here in the clothes of the camp's cleaning worker. But do we want to talk about the characters who behave in a stupid way? A cliché of the youthful slasher, you will say, but in 'Bloody Nightmare' every limit is exceeded. Furthermore, the writing of these characters leaves much to be desired. Alison's nightmares and torments are poorly inserted into the story and if they were to be a narrative device to convey suspicions about her to the viewer, the screenwriters David Lee Fein and R.L. O'Keefe certainly did not succeed. Numerous the narrative inconsistencies and banalities, of which the same cheerleader competition that is at the center of the plot is a representative, whose participation and development dynamics are at best ridiculous. The film's solution and the identification of the killer is, then, of a disarming obviousness; I challenge anyone who has seen at least a couple of films of this genre not to identify the culprit after a dozen minutes from the beginning. A sea of defects and ridiculousness seasoned with some sporadic murders that aim at gore (at least that!) for a title of difficult retrieval and disappeared from circulation for a long time...to good entendedor, once and for all! Suitable only for slasher completists.