1979, United States. Starring Susan Kiger, Lisa London, Pamela Jean Bryant, Kimberly Carson, Mary Steelsmith, Angela Aames, Marjorie Andrade, Cece Bullard, Karen Smith, Robyn Martin, Lindsay Bloom, K.C. Winkler, Sandy Johnson, Marilyn Rubin. Directed by Gerald Seth Sindell. Available on DVD from Amazon

So I think we have this and Pom-Pom Girls, and then we're pretty much finished with the whole cheerleader exploitation thing and can move on to more important genres like sexy stewardess sexploitation and naughty nurse sexploitation. You may recall in my review of the first of these films I watched for this site, The Swinging Cheerleaders, I stated that I wasn't all that interested in cheerleader movies. Well obviously, since this is the fourth one I've reviewed so far, that initial assertion hasn't proven to be entirely accurate. What I should have said is that I don't care for cheerleader movies that are like H.O.T.S.

H.O.T.S. was one of those perennial late-night cable favorites that would entice young boys to find a way to stay up late and get a glimpse of the many forbidden fruits put on display. For me, this usually meant going over to my friend Rob's house since there was no cable television where we lived, but his dad had installed one of those gigantic old satellite TV systems that could pick up everything. Although our favorites were Sword and the Sorcerer, Revenge of the Ninja, and that first Emanuelle film with Sylvia Kristel, we'd pretty much watch anything that was on so long as it promised us bloodshed or nudity, or preferable, some tantalizing combination of both. While the commercials for H.O.T.S. didn't seem to promote much in the way of bloodshed, they did trumpet the idea that there would be naked boobs galore. And so we planned our schedules and assumed that we'd have another classic piece of entertainment to add to our list.

It's pretty clear to me now that the reason I thought I didn't like cheerleader sexploitation was because the only one I'd ever seen was H.O.T.S., and even as a young lad desperate for anything with a hint of nudity, I recognized that H.O.T.S. stunk and stunk bad. I seem to even recall that halfway through we simply gave up and decided to watch something else - and given the broadcast schedule for cable TV at the time, there's a 90% chance we ended up watching Beastmaster for the umpteenth time. Now, I have nothing but fondness for Beastmaster, but it really says something about your nudie cheerleader movie when a couple of kids would rather watch Beastmaster yet again than finish the sexploitation.

H.O.T.S., for all its promise, turned out to be idiotic, tedious, and surprisingly timid. Now idiotic I can take in a nudie film. I wouldn't be one to claim that filth like The Cheerleaders and Revenge of the Cheerleaders was anything but idiotic. And perhaps even a bit tedious. But at least they weren't timid. When they decided to bare it all, they bared it all. H.O.T.S., coming as it does at the very tail end of the cheerleader exploitation arc, suffers from increasing limitations on what could be gotten away with in a film. Thus this movie has a distinct lack of the full nudity we've come to love and expect from movies of the 1970s. Unable to be as brash and flat-out twisted as previous films, this final whimper (or first murmur of the 1980s teen sex comedy) attempts to make up for its lack of guts by stealing the plot from Animal House and putting more boobs on parade since it can't show anything else.

The thing movies this wretched never seem to understand is that when you steal the plot of a film that is much better than yours, all it's going to do is remind people that they could be watching Animal House instead. H.O.T.S. has more in common with that movie than with any of the 1970s cheerleader films, and in fact, it's not so much that it has anything in common with Animal House as much as it has everything in common with all those God awful 1980s teen sex comedies that flooded the world in the wake of Animal House. If you're around my age, you know the ones. A team of misfits, probably possessed of an unquenchable thirst for sex and beer, must devise a plan to let them beat the snotty rich kids in the big ski race/raft race/football game/what have you. Along the way, a lot of twenty-something starlets will show their boobs, and probably at least one guy will fall off a ladder.

H.O.T.S. fulfills all the requirements of the genre and then some by taking it a step further and making the plot even more similar to Animal House. Our heroic girls are part of the H.O.T.S. anti-sorority, the hottest and sassiest group of girls on campus. Hijinks, often of a sexual nature, are the order of the day when the H.O.T.S. ladies (Heather, O'Hare, Teri, and Sam) decide that in order to get back at the evil sorority, they'll steal every man on campus and thus deprive the snobby girls of their daily lovin'…at least until the antics of the H.O.T.S. girls steams the uptight dean and he threatens to close down their house. Naturally, the day can only be saved by engaging in some sort of sporting activity against the rival rich girl sorority, and the sport they chose is strip football.

So yeah, dumb enough, right? But it's not so dumb that the movie couldn't be good for at least something so long as it appealed to the sordid side of what people might desire in their late-night sleazy movies. And while H.O.T.S. does feature a large number of bountiful bouncing breasts and waste no time in getting to them, it turns out they're not enough to make up for the film's horrendous acting, painful attempts at comedy, and shockingly boring script. It turns out, contrary to what you may believe, that yes, a movie can be so bad that not even a lot of boobs can save it. I thought that maybe I'd overestimated how bad the film was when I was young, but secretly I knew that wasn't the case. I was just making excuses for renting it again so Teleport City could be something like, "The number one online authority on sleazy cheerleader movies." I mean hell, if the movie couldn't past muster when I was eleven, it sure as hell wasn't going to get any better with age. And it turns out that it got even worse. I wouldn't call it the worst 1980s teen sex comedy ever made, but it's certainly up there in the running. Once again, despite my best efforts, I couldn't finish the movie. I ended up watching the last forty minutes on so on fast forward just so I could say that at least I made it to the end. Even that was a chore. There is probably an actual matehematical way to graph the point at which boob shots no longer compensate for the abysmalness of the movie in which they appear. Whatever that graph may look like, H.O.T.S. definitely appears ont he negative end of the bouncing bell curve.

The comedy is on the level of things like the college being F.U. Heh heh. Get it? And the evil sorority? Pi! You know, like, as in…you know. Also, there's a fat chick because comedy demands a fat chick. Man, this movie makes Revenge of the Cheerleaders seem inspired for casting David Hasselhoff as a guy named Boner. About the best you get here is Danny Bonaduce in bed with a seal. Even if the comedy had been funny, the delivery would have killed it since pretty much no one could act -- though that didn't stop several of the girls from going on to lucrative careers in awful direct-to-video sci-fi and horror films and, one assumes, appearing regularly at the Chiller Theatre convention. Kim Carson, who plays H.O.T.S. founder Sam, probably had the most prolific post-H.O.T.S. career. She has some ninety-five films to her credit, many with titles like Talk Dirty to Me IV, New Wave Hookers, Rockin' Erotica, and the much-acclaimed Cumshot Revue II, which personally I felt suffered from trying to be bigger and more expensive than the original while forgetting what made part one such a classic. I'm willing to bet all of those films actually have better scripts and acting than this one.

You know what? I really hate this movie. I hate it a lot. And when I hate a movie this much, it's not even any fun to write about it - and I haven't even gotten to the scene with the robot. I wouldn't recommend H.O.T.S. even if you are hard up for boobs. You might as well just go ahead and rent one of the older cheerleader movies from the 1970s. Not only do they show a lot more, they somehow manage to be a lot less irksome than this "dawn of the 80s sex comedy" film. At least they go all out with their nudity and had the good sense not to dally too long in between sex scenes. H.O.T.S. has stretches of gut-wrenchingly unfunny comedy that seem to go on for a truly epic amount of time, and nothing slows time down more effectively than bad, unfunny comedy. And this isn't the sort of bad comedy that is so bad it actually becomes funny. No, this is just bad comedy that is so bad that it's boring, and then they make it last for a long time. As a kid, I simply turned to a different channel. As a grown man who really should be ashamed of himself for even thinking of watching H.O.T.S., I was pondering gouging out my eyes before I decided to simply get the film over with and never think about it again.

H.O.T.S. It's a teen sex comedy that can't even capture the attention of a teenager. If you think to defend the film by saying that it's pointless to criticize the acting or story in a film like this, then all I can say then is, first of all, it shouldn't have had so much acting and story if it couldn't do those things. And secondly, even as brainless sleazy sexploitation, H.O.T.S. fails utterly despite some nice breasts on display. There is absolutely no reason to watch the movie, unless you need something to demonstrate to you the merits of The Cheerleaders and Revenge of the Cheerleaders, which are the movies you should probably be watching instead of H.O.T.S.. You know, this movie has put in a bad mood, now, which makes it even worse. What kind of wacky sex romp puts you in a bad mood? I'm going to have to go watch Bruce Lee pull out Chuck Norris' chest hair just to make myself feel better.

The best way to sum up the whole experience goes thusly: when I was in college, my good friend Eric was working as an usher at a movie theater when showgirls hit the screens. I myself worked as an usher a few years prior, but that was when Home Alone came out. Anyway, it being a high-profile NC-17 sleazefest, theaters knew that every underage kid worth their weight in salt was going to be devising complicated schemes for sneaking in to see the film. So one of Eric's jobs was to stand guard over the doorway and recheck ticket stubs for anyone entering the forbidden auditorium of unearthly delights presented in the form of the chick from Saved by the Bell giving a lap dance to the guy from Twin Peaks. During one of the showings, perhaps an hour into the movie, a guy walks out of the theater, turns to Eric, and says, "Tits and ass aren't worth a movie that bad."

Labels: Cheerleaders, Netflix Diary, Sexploitation, Year: 1979