“Spirit fingers won’t save you from the old gods.”
Rating: ⭐½ (One and a half out of five stars)
If you’ve ever watched a cheerleading competition and thought, “You know what this needs? Ritualistic dismemberment and confusing twin mythology,” then Martha / Stella: Tribal Cheerleaders Destroyed is your cinematic spirit animal. For everyone else, this is 78 minutes of glorious, baffling, often boring carnage that plays like a fever dream written by a teenager who just discovered pagan forums.
The film follows Martha (a wooden Jenna Kline) and Stella (a slightly more emotive Lia Torres), twin sisters who are co-captains of the “Serpent Creek Vipers,” a high school cheer squad with a hidden past. During a team-building retreat on land leased from a local tribe, the girls accidentally perform a routine that mirrors an ancient “purification dance.” The tribe’s exiled elder (a scenery-chewing character named “Old Crow”) warns that the squad has “three sunsets to undo the cheer, or the land will take its sacrifice.”
Naturally, they double down on their basket tosses. The result? The “Tribal Cheerleaders” (a clumsy term the film never defines) are systematically destroyed—one by snakebite, one by a collapsing pyramid, and two by what appears to be an angry badger painted with ochre. The climax involves Martha and Stella fighting each other with pompoms dipped in broken glass.
“Spirit fingers won’t save you from the old gods.”
Rating: ⭐½ (One and a half out of five stars) Martha -- Stella -- Tribal Cheerleaders Destroyed ...
If you’ve ever watched a cheerleading competition and thought, “You know what this needs? Ritualistic dismemberment and confusing twin mythology,” then Martha / Stella: Tribal Cheerleaders Destroyed is your cinematic spirit animal. For everyone else, this is 78 minutes of glorious, baffling, often boring carnage that plays like a fever dream written by a teenager who just discovered pagan forums. “Spirit fingers won’t save you from the old gods
The film follows Martha (a wooden Jenna Kline) and Stella (a slightly more emotive Lia Torres), twin sisters who are co-captains of the “Serpent Creek Vipers,” a high school cheer squad with a hidden past. During a team-building retreat on land leased from a local tribe, the girls accidentally perform a routine that mirrors an ancient “purification dance.” The tribe’s exiled elder (a scenery-chewing character named “Old Crow”) warns that the squad has “three sunsets to undo the cheer, or the land will take its sacrifice.” The film follows Martha (a wooden Jenna Kline)
Naturally, they double down on their basket tosses. The result? The “Tribal Cheerleaders” (a clumsy term the film never defines) are systematically destroyed—one by snakebite, one by a collapsing pyramid, and two by what appears to be an angry badger painted with ochre. The climax involves Martha and Stella fighting each other with pompoms dipped in broken glass.