Cherry Falls at 25: Still a subversive slasher

“If word gets back to these kids that someone’s murdering virgins, we’re going to have a goddamn… fuckfest on our hands,” the school principal barely whispers in disgust. “It’s better than a pile of dead teenagers,” responds the cop. Say what you will about Cherry Falls, a semi-provocative and definitely strange slasher movie that snuck into release 25 years ago, but it certainly has a handle on the ways that its horror subgenre blurs the line between two different types of body counts. (It even brings out the “dead teenager” terminology that Roger Ebert used to deride slasher pictures of the 1980s and beyond.)