Sometimes a movie is misunderstood. Sometimes it’s ahead of its time.
And sometimes… sometimes a movie is Pandemonium, a 1982 slasher parody so catastrophically unfunny, so structurally allergic to coherence, that it’s not ahead of its time—it’s not in any recognizable time zone. It exists in a pocket dimension where jokes die quietly and plotlines wander aimlessly like lost tourists.
With a cast that includes actual talents—Eileen Brennan! Carol Kane! Paul Reubens! Phil Hartman!—one might imagine a chaotic, energetic comedy. What we get instead is a film that feels like a rejected SNL sketch stretched to 90 minutes by people who weren’t fully convinced it should exist.
This is a parody of slashers, yes. But more importantly, it’s a parody of good decision-making.
**The Opening Murders:
Cheerleaders, Javelins, and the Death of Timing**
The film begins in 1963, when a cheerleading squad is murdered via javelin throwing with all the grace and subtlety of a shot put accident. The moment is meant to be absurdist, but lands with the elegance of wet laundry.
Then more cheerleaders die via exploding pom-poms, a concept so stupid it should be hilarious… if only the movie understood pacing, setup, delivery, punchline, or humor.
It’s slapstick without the slap and parody without the parody. The only thing exploding is your patience.
**Fast Forward to 1982:
Time Passes, but the Jokes Don’t Improve**
Two decades later, the cheerleading camp reopens. This is a mistake. Not just narratively, but morally. This camp should have been condemned, paved over, and repurposed into an active sinkhole.
The new instructor, Bambi (Candice Azzara), is a veteran cheerleader who acts like she escaped from a 1970s tampon commercial. She is warned repeatedly that the camp is cursed, which she ignores, establishing her primary character trait: terminal stupidity.
Also, she bathes in milk and cookies at one point, which I assume the script intended as a joke but instead reads like a cry for help.
**The Campers:
Every Teen Stereotype, No Actual Characters**
We meet the incoming “cheerleaders,” though calling them characters is generous.
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Candy (Carol Kane) is labeled “Victim #1,” which is somehow both accurate and misleading.
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Glenn Dandy (Judge Reinhold) is a male cheerleader whose family is so eccentric that the Addams Family would call for a wellness check.
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Mandy is obsessed with dental hygiene, a quirk the movie treats like comedic gold even though it barely qualifies as comedic copper.
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Sandy hitchhikes with President Ronald Reagan, because in this movie, reality is just an optional suggestion.
Two male cheerleaders named Andy and Randy also show up, immediately get blazed, and attempt to be horny. They succeed only at the second part.
These characters aren’t even stereotypes—they’re rough drafts of stereotypes.
Carol Kane: A Treasure Wasted
Carol Kane gives this film more effort than it deserves. She plays Candy as a wide-eyed oddball with literal laser eyes—yes, her eyes shoot death beams, and the movie treats this as casually as seasonal allergies.
Kane tries. Hard. But Pandemonium gives her nothing. She is a comedic engine powering a car with three wheels, no gas, and a steering wheel stolen from a carnival ride.
**The Mountie:
A Character Who Wandered in From a Different, Equally Bad Movie**
Tom Smothers plays Sgt. Reginald Cooper, a Canadian Mountie inexplicably transported to Indiana. He is supposed to be our hero.
He is not heroic.
He is not funny.
He is barely conscious.
He sings a duet with Candy, looks confused most of the time, and reads his lines as if discovering them for the first time mid-sentence.
He also rides a horse named Bob, because of course he does.
**The Murderers (Plural):
Serial Killers With the Competence of Dropped Lasagna**
At one point, we meet:
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Jarrett, a murderer who made bookshelves out of his family.
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Dr. Fuller, who helps him sell human-furniture.
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Fletcher, an asylum escapee hitchhiking with Jarrett.
Their scenes play like someone dared the writer to squeeze three horror subplots into one scene and lost the bet halfway through. Nothing they do matters, nothing adds up, and nothing is funny.
Their entire subplot feels like a deleted scene from a better, equally insane horror spoof.
**The Murders Continue:
More Cheerleaders, Less Logic**
The killer lurks around campus, apparently operating on pure resentment and possibly decaf coffee.
Mandy dies in the world’s least sexy bathroom scene, drilled through her medicine cabinet. Glenn is blown up on a trampoline. Bambi is drowned in cookies-and-milk bathwater like she’s being sacrificed to the Goddess of Calcium.
Andy, Randy, and Sandy die one after another during strip poker, establishing a moment of cohesion in the film: the filmmakers clearly hate cheerleaders.
Meanwhile, the audience experiences a different kind of death: slow, comedic suffocation.
**The Big Reveal:
The Killer Is… A Washed-Up Football Star Who Wanted to Cheer?**
The killer turns out to be Blue Grange (Tab Hunter), a local hero who wanted to be a cheerleader but was forced into football. His trauma manifests as murder.
Yes, this is the big twist:
A football player with unresolved dreams becomes a cheerleader-murdering psychopath.
This is less a twist and more a career counseling PSA gone wrong.
Candy stops him by using her eye lasers to animate a giant statue of him, which then flattens him like a Looney Tunes gag.
At this point, the film transcends parody and enters the realm of Cartoon Hell.
**The Ending:
Riding Away on a Horse Because Why Not**
Candy and Cooper literally ride into the sunset on his horse Bob, proving the film has absolutely no idea how to end itself. It simply gives up, shrugs, and trots off the field.
You can almost hear the director say:
“Is the movie over? Great—someone unplug the lights.”
**Final Verdict:
A Parody That Forgets to Be Funny, Scary, or Coherent**
Pandemonium wants to be Airplane! meets Friday the 13th.
Instead, it’s Airplane! without jokes and Friday the 13th without deaths worth watching.
It’s a film where:
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punchlines go missing like kidnapped cheerleaders
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the pacing is a violent crime
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every subplot fights for attention like children at a birthday party
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talent is squandered at every turn
It isn’t scary.
It isn’t funny.
It isn’t even “so bad it’s good.”
It’s simply pandemonium—the cinematic version of dropping a bag of props down the stairs and pretending it’s a movie.
If cheerleading is about spirit, rhythm, and energy, this film is the opposite: a limp pom-pom abandoned under the bleachers.
