Movie Movie Podcast

Working in a high school means a LOT of my movies will take place in one now…

#DeadAF

This is a teen slasher much like the slashers of the Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer vein.

We open on a packed high school football game.  Wellington High is losing to rival Regency South by a score of 20-14.  There are 10 seconds left in the game, when star Quarterback Jeff Worthy, decides to audible the play and instead of passing the ball to a wide open Leon, the best receiver, he scrambles on a broken play and runs the ball upfield before being tackled at the 1 yard line.  Wellington loses.  The crowd boos heavily.  After the game, Jeff’s teammates are giving him shit for losing the game for them and he says, at least he tried…Shortly thereafter, Jeff is in the shower still after the game and hears his phone go off.  He gets out of the shower to check the message,  and it’s from twitter.  The name is @redacted and the message is, “Tonight, you’re gonna be #DeadAF”  He laughs it off and starts changing. He hears a tap on one of the lockers, when he goes to investigate, he hears it at a locker on the other side of the locker room.  This goes on once or twice, and Jeff says “haha very funny, cut it out.” Right at that point, our killer, wearing all black and a Heath Ledgers, Joker Mask jumps out and stabs Jeff in the face repeatedly.  He then takes a picture of Jeff’s mangled face and posts it to Jeff’s instagram.  The caption is “I’m #DeadAF”

TITLE CARD.

Our movie begins and is mostly centered around Jeff’s main friend circle at his funeral:

Mandy: Jeff’s Cheerleader GF with a heart of gold

Leon: The Cool Black Guy and teammate

Morris: The nerdy-adjacent backup QB

Cassidy: Mandy’s bitchier cheerleader friend, who she shouldn’t be friends with

Mandy is crying at Jeff’s funeral while Leon and Morris look on clearly upset.  Cassidy is texting her fugbuddy Rick, telling him this funeral is making her horny.  Rick texts her back to send a pic, so she starts inconspicuously sexting at the funeral, much to Mandy’s dismay.  This is just to establish that Cassidy should die later.  After the funeral, the gang goes to the football field to drink their sorrows away.  It is here that they start really talking about how not only can they not believe Jeff is dead, but that his last instagram is him dead and the cops don’t have any leads.  Morris makes the astute assertion that it could have been anyone.  At that moment, all four of our leads get dm’s from @redacted reading “Soon…#Dead”  This makes Mandy kinda freak out but no one other than Morris thinks it’s legit.  Leon thinks it’s a stupid joke, and Cassidy thinks its kinda funny.  Nonetheless they go to Principal Hayward’s office to tell her about the message, but she doesn’t take anything on Social Media seriously.  She says a bunch of stuff about Millenials not caring about anything real.  Mandy decides that if no one is going to take her seriously, she’ll go to the authorites herself.  When she gets to the police station Detective Miller, says he’ll do whatever he can to get to the bottom of Jeff’s murder it because he hates it when people don’t take the youth seriously.  “Millenials are people too” he says.  Mandy leaves feeling a lot better about things.  It’s the first time she’s been happy enough to gram again.  We see Mandy make a #tbt of her and Jeff.

The next week at school, in English class, Leon and Mandy both get DM’s from @redacted reading “#DeadA”.  Leon still thinks it’s all just a stupid joke, and tells Mandy not to take any of this stuff seriously.  The big homecoming game against North South is Friday night and Leon has to get serious.  In fact, he needs to leave to go practice with Morris.  Leon gets up in the middle of class and goes down to change for practice.  He goes down to the coaches office first to talk about the big game, but Coach Beeller’s door is closed and it looks like he’s watching film intently.  Leon, knocks on the door, and coach doesn’t move at all.  Finally, he walks in and sees that Coach Beeller is dead.  He’s been stabbed in the face!  (on Beeller’s shirt we see that a hashtag has been drawn in blood.  Leon lets out a crazy loud scream, at which time Morris comes from behind. He’s got blood all over his shirt, but he tells Leon to be quiet and that the killer could still be here.  Leon gets suspicious because Morris is super bloody.  He asks why he’s covered.  Morris says because he saw Beeller bleeding out from the face and tried to help but was too late.   Leon doesn’t seem too convinced and says “just stay away from me!”

Leon goes to cheerleading practice to let both Mandy and Cassidy know none of this a joke and someone is really targeting them.  Mandy calls Detective Miller and the school decides to let everyone go home and cancel the homecoming game.  Everyone is pissed, but if members of the football and cheerleading team are getting targeting a game would be ground zero.  That is Principal Hayward’s logic.  Cassidy says the game might be cancelled but she’s still going to have the party.  Leon and Mandy don’t think it’s a good idea, but Morris, who gives a very convincing statement to Detective Miller says it might be good to have a distraction. Leon and Mandy grudgingly go along with it.

At Cassidy’s mansion of a house, the entire school, jocks and un-cools alike all come to the giant bonfire party and drink their faces off.  There are all the trappings of a movie party including people effing in bedrooms and breaking stuff.  Cassidy doesn’t seem to care about any of her house getting messed up cause it’s her stepdad’s house.  Anyway, she gets a text from Rick saying “I’m watching you…touch yourself” Cassidy because she’s been written to be an idiot with no agency of her own, starts taking weird sexy pics of herself and asking for Rick to do the same.  Rick tells her first come upstairs to an empty room and wait.  She giggles and goes up to one of her many rooms, and she begins to undress.  The door slowly opens and (oh by the way it’s a costume party) she shes a figure that resembles Rick’s build but he’s wearing that Heath Ledger Joker costume and mask.  She tells him to “come and get it”  he says “oh i will” and she freaks cause it’s not Ricks voice.  It’s the killer.  He throws her around a bunch first and while she’s screaming everyone just thinks it’s crazy sex and they cheer from outside.  Cassidy ends up getting stabbed in the face a bunch too.  The party goers all see the same notification from her instagram “This BETCH is #DeadAF”

Everyone runs from the party now that it’s clear the killer is among them.  Leon and Mandy, who are starting to become a thing are at the party and run up to the room where Cassidy was killed.  Morris shows up right as everyone is running away from the party and checks in with Leon and Mandy.  He asks what happened, and they tell him to stay away.  At this point they think he’s too calm to not be the killer.  Leon goes in on how Morris always wanted to be the starting QB and now he’s taking it out on all of them.  Morris says it’s true, but he would NEVER go on a killing spree over it.  Mandy says, well it’s too late because she’s already called Detective Miller and Morris isn’t going anywhere until they account for his whereabouts.  Miller shows up and Leon has Morris tied to a chair for safe measure.  Before Morris even gets a chance to speak, Miller says he believes Morris isn’t the killer.  Leon and Mandy ask him why.  Miller says because “I AM!”  He departs from his typical mode of killing and just shoots Morris in the chest. Mandy does the crying damsel thing and says “no no no no no why?” and he’s concocts some gobbledygook about how he was never cool in high school and all this town cares about is it’s football players, and it’s cheerleaders and its’ social media, but ignores the real people who make a difference.  He wanted to burn it all down or something.  Leon tells him his crazy, and Miller says “I know.”  Then he says “hey honey, lets play with these ones for a while”  Out pops Principal Hayward.  She’s been in on it too, because she wanted to kill all the popular people and go back to running a school that cared about education.  She didn’t do any of the killing, but she let Miller into the school and told her where all the football players and cheerleaders were (oh a bunch more people died that no one cared about too).  Leon and Mandy start running, and when it’s clear that they have nowhere left to go, Leon starts attacking Miller, who has a knife and a gun.  He ends up dying heroically in one of those wrestle for the gun but it goes off and we don’t know who dies things.

Mandy is the only one left.  After she dies the school will become pure again and free of the millenial skurge of social media.  Mandy has no weapons and is cornered, but she is close to a light switch that controls the whole house.  She shuts it off and manages to escape the room.  She’s doing a lot of cheerleadery acrobatic stuff in this scene, and she almost gets out of the house before Hayward tackles to the ground.  Miller says he’s going to love this one.  It’ll be his best instagram yet.  Right as he wields his knife ready to stab, Morris stands up and says “hashtag this!” and shoots Miller in the face.  Hayward gets up right away and tells Morris that it’s all over and doesn’t need to go any further.  Mandy standing next to Morris says “you’re right.  It doesn’t”, grabs the gun and shoots Hayward.  

All of the other cops FINALLY show up to the scene and the movie ends.  We see Mandy back at school with Morris months later.  The school is safe and secure, but people don’t communicate on their phones as much.  They have face to face conversations.  Then we see Mandy’s notifications go off.  She jumps at first, but then sees it’s a text from her parents who have not been in this movie at all.  They say we love you.  She smiles and says I love you too.

The End.

So many sequels are coming bro…