Dir. David Zagorski (2024)
A group of new high school graduates travel to a cabin in the woods to celebrate. Hilarity does not ensue.
Some movies are so bad that they're good, and some movies are just bad. It's a fine line to walk, and it's much more common that a filmmaker makes a movie that he intends to be good that simply isn't. I generally try not to critique indie horror too harshly, but it's getting more and more difficult to walk that fine line as production values are climbing due to the advancements in technology. Horny Teenagers Must Die, the new film from David Zagorski, is at once exactly what you think it's going to be and still aggressively not entertaining, a mixture of terrible acting, plain looking people, and a general lack of anything that comes close to entertainment.
A group of teenagers that just graduated high school head to a cabin in the woods to throw a party to celebrate. Once there, they find themselves being attacked by a killer whose weapons of choice alternate between farm tools and sex toys. As the teens try to relax and enjoy their weekend doing drugs and having sex, they are forced to survive a serial killer, a lack of food, and teen pregnancy. Ya know, as one does.
It doesn't take a lot to make a good teen horror movie. You can have all of this film's shortcomings and still make an entertaining film. Don't get me wrong, there's enough here to please the less discerning horror fan: there are numerous kills, unlikeable characters, and a few tits. It would've been more than enough to have just a little humor to go with the rote plot, but any attempts largely missed by a mile. Horny Teenagers Must Die feels like a movie that would be happening in another horror movie. Like, if a horror comedy featured a bunch of characters watching a terrible horror movie, this would be the film they were watching. It's laughably bad, and even during its better moments its subpar.
It is, however a slasher film, and I've still yet to watch a slasher movie I didn't at least somewhat enjoy. It's dumb, terribly acted, and with some horrible writing as well, but there's a decent number of kills and enough reliance on genre tropes that it has that summer camp feel the best slashers tend to embody. Granted, this is far from the "best" slasher. It's a Z-grade film at best, and if there were more letters in the alphabet, it would likely be lower than that. You could definitely do worse, just not by a whole lot. At the very least, the ending is crazy enough to appreciate.
Who this movie is for: Dumb teen horror fans, Horror "comedy" fans, Bad movie lovers
Bottom line: Horny Teenagers Must Die isn't even as good as it sounds. It's terrible quality, horrible acting, and little to no comedy in a film that clearly patterns itself as a horror comedy slasher. But, there are some boobs, a decent number of kills, and some relatively entertaining indie gore effects. If you're just looking for a horror movie and not a good horror movie, it may well be worth your time. It's a mixture of Full Moon and Troma, if neither company particularly knew how to make movies. It's streaming free on Tubi if you want to check it out yourself.
