Sleepy Hollow High (2000) (USA)

 ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Five elderly teenage assholes are forced to clean up the woods of Sleepy Hollow under the suspicious eye of their teacher with anger issues (hilariously named Mr. E and looking like he cosplaying as Fisher Stevens in Hackers if he were an accountant). Drug-dealing Z works as the alpha-dink to the group of hoodlums who may be in their thirties but are supposedly high school seniors. To the surprise of nobody, there’s a sword-slinging psychopath on horseback with a pumpkin head making his way around the forest and chopping off the noggins of our unlikable tagonists (pro nor an, but the agony fits). As soon as the opening credits end, a morning (maybe dusk) jogger lets us know that this costumed creep means business. Is it an angry acquaintance using the local legend to dish out a twisted form of justice or is it the actual local legend roaming around and collecting heads? It’ll take plenty of severed domes and even more woods-wandering before they answer that little question. There will be other questions answered as well. What’s the best way to respond to a pregnant girl’s suicide attempt? Offer her soda in an unmarked water bottle. Why are goth chicks so ornery? Because they’re hackers that don’t feel like they fit in. I already knew that one. Why are middle-aged teenagers so easy to sneak up on? I think it’s a mixture of sciatica pain and a loss of peripheral vision. Where did old pumpkin man get his pants? Unfortunately we don’t get a definitive answer but I have a feeling there’s a passed out homeless man Winnie the Poohing it out in the streets of Maryland. Kris Arth and Kevin Summerfield pointed a camera at the ugly heart of troubled teens in 2000s America but when they realized that even the best of teenagers are an awful companion to spend any time with, they injected a backyard slasher into its veins and got it hooked on a video store high from about a decade earlier. Then they somehow pulled George Stover out of whatever hibernation Don Dohler kept him in to make the dozens of folks that actually love this kind of output even happier. Inexperience is overshadowed by the will to make a horror film with anything available to them and manages to plunge a flaming sword right into my Polonia-addicted heart. The Maryland woods are suitably dead and add the right fall vibes for this shit and had me thinking of every Midwest forest I’d get drunk in when I was a younger man.