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Tuesday, November 23, 2004HOTS
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 posted by Keith at 12:19 AM | 0 Comments Friday, September 03, 2004The Cheerleaders
1973, United States. Starring Stephanie Fondue, Denise Dillaway, Jovita Bush, Brandy Woods, Kimberly Hyde, Clair Dia, Richard Meatwhistle, Jonathan Jacobs, Raoul Hoffnung, Patrick M. Wright, Terri Teague, Charles Goldman, John Bracci. Directed by Paul Glicker. Available on DVD from Amazon.
Is it art or is it porn? While this question may be bandied about for years to come in regards to The Night Porter and Salon Kitty, answering that question for a movie like The Cheerleaders should take about as much time as it would take for a chorus of people to shout out in unison, "It's porn!" Where The Night Porter represents the tendency in the 1970s of filmmakers to try and blur the lines between art and exploitation, The Cheerleaders represents the same decade's commitment to movies that just want to give you something to jerk off to in the grindhouse. There is nary a single shred of artistic value or even common decency, not a single glimmer of aspirations to something greater. The Cheerleaders is unrelenting and indefensible sleaze. And predictably enough, to that we say, "Rah rah rah!" Now I think the biggest complaint that you can lodge against this film isn't that it features gratuitous nudity or horrible acting, or that the characters we see giving blowjobs and having gangbangs are supposed to be fifteen or sixteen years old. No, the biggest flaw in this film is that the cheerleading is really quite bad. Nothing rhymes. None of the cheers are catchy. The cheerleaders aren't even performing in unison. How can the team go on to win the big game when the cheerleading is so shoddy? Opening narration explains how the Amorosa High football team is on a winning streak and school spirit is at an all-time high. What could be causing this is a mystery. And though the film implies it's all thanks to the cheerleaders, when you actually see them cheer, you'll realize that the upturn in school spirit is still a mystery.
So you know, what with the cheering being so bad and all, it just sort of shattered the illusion of reality for me that this film could have otherwise created. Everything else is pretty true to life, after all, like how the cheerleaders drive around in their convertible sports car all the time in their cheerleader outfits and still doing cheers, even when they're just going to eat hotdogs, or how the cheerleaders are always having naked slumber parties, or how they always save the day - usually by employing sex. These parts of the film take on an almost cinema verite reflection of real life which is undermined whenever we're asked to believe that these are the greatest cheerleaders in all the land. The plot is pretty complex and along the same lines as the plots to the various Girls Gone Wild films. Young Jeannie has a problem: at fifteen years of age, she is still, tragically, a virgin. She figures the best way to lick this problem is by taking the advice of a couple friends and trying out for the cheerleading squad. She makes it, but her efforts to deflower herself at the hands of some virile young lad continue to be stymied when the squad captain Claudia has made a bet that she can foil Jeannie's noble plans for the entire season. Wacky hijinks ensue and require the cheerleaders to take off all their clothes as often as possible, all in the name of sexual liberation and freedom and America! Oh yeah, the sleazy janitor is also planning to fix the next game, because someone always has to be fixing the game in these cheerleader movies. Unfortunately for him, the cheerleaders have their own plan to help the team by sapping the opponents of all their strength. Can you guess how? Remember, this was back in the days when football players were dedicated gridiron gladiators who never fooled around before the game and could have their strength instantly sapped by them by having sex the night before. Too bad the cheerleaders also had a big orgy with their own players, making everyone on the field so very sleepy! But wait! Is that a fourth string runningback the other team has? The cheerleaders missed him! Can anyone but Jeannie come to the rescue and save Amorosa from the shame of losing a high school football game?
Needless to say, this is very much a "what you see is what you get" type of film, and believe me you see a lot. As I said when I reviewed two previous cheerleader exploitation films, Revenge of the Cheerleaders and The Swinging Cheerleaders, these films are a prime example of what you could get away with in the carefree and easy 70s that would get you locked up in today's more conservative and timid atmosphere. Consider, first of all, that the crisis presented to us is that a fifteen-year-old girl hasn't gotten laid yet. No one leaps up and says, "Well, you should wait until you get older anyway." Nah, the general reaction is more along the lines of, "Freaky! Let's get you some sex!" In addition, you have older teachers, male and female, both getting it on with underage (according to the script, remember) girls, and that's cool, too. And then you have Jeannie's own dad who leers at his naked daughter from time to time before also having sex with one of the cheerleaders. And then you have the scene in which Jeannie's initiation to the squad involves her having to shower in the boys' locker room, just when the team comes running in with their minds on a gangbang. Har har har! And then Claudia teaches Jeannie that the best way to seduce thugs is to pretend you want to be treated rough. These are all valuable lessons for young girls to learn, of course. Tasteless doesn't even begin to describe The Cheerleaders. It gleefully does things with supposed high school girls that most modern films won't even do with adult characters. But like most oddball skin flicks from the 1970s, there's such an exuberant…innocence certainly isn't the word I'm looking for…such a joyously perverse celebration of all things tawdry that I can't imagine being truly offended by the sexual content. But that's just me, and I'm perverted in many ways. If you are going to be offended, then you're better off being offended by the lack of a plot or the amazing absence of acting skill from every performer. But at the same time, you should just be ashamed of yourself if you sit down to watch The Cheerleaders and expect taut plotting, engrossing characters, and stand-out performances. If that's the case, then frankly, you deserve to have sat through a scene of a fat guy in a jock strap crawling around on the floor while a cheerleader licks a baseball bat. Since this is technically supposed to be a sex comedy, the movie does have to take time out from all the nudity - and there is a ton of it, more than in any other cheerleader movie and more than in most 70s sexploitation films in general - for crude humor the likes of which would make even Benny Hill shake his head in embarrassment. Ho ho ho! The janitor is a peeping tom! Oh, the hilarity! Jeannie's dad is willing to let the cheerleading team stay over for a slumber party, and he offers them grilled wieners! And, ummm…well, really that's about it. Even Revenge of the Cheerleaders had more gags than this film, even if most of them involved cheerleaders eating phallic shaped food items. The only way I can think of to describe the comedy in The Cheerleaders is to say it ranks somewhere below watching someone get hit in the balls, but only slightly above getting hit in the balls yourself.
As a skin flick, though, you'd really have a hard time beating The Cheerleaders. Or maybe, you wouldn't have a hard time beating it, but that is a joke I'm just not going to make. Aww, crap. Too late. Some of the girls are kind of homely in a Pippi Longstocking way, but this was the 1970s and everyone was hot as long as they took off their clothes and weren't fat. The cheerleading outfits are tiny, but that's not of much concern since they come off in almost every scene. Stephanie Fondue as Jeannie has that "friend's cute little sister" thing going, which of course, is creepy and sleazy just like everything else in this film. Denise Dilliway's captain Claudia is the more developed, experienced, and kinky of the girls, while Jovita Bush's Bonnie is the best looking. Everyone gets naked all the time, and sex is had in cheesy bachelor pads, fast food restaurants (nothing turns you on like have sex on a dirty deep fryer), car washes, locker rooms, trophy rooms, gardens, and well eventually you just loose track. The guys in the movies are either sleazy old dudes or meatheaded jocks. Curiously, almost no one form this cast went on to bigger and better things. In fact, most of them never went on to anything, period, and this remains the sole entry in their filmography. The only familiar face, if you can call it that, is Pat Wright as the football team's coach. He starred in a stack of films including Revenge of the Cheerleaders, the hillbilly sexploitation comedy Sassy Sue, Caged Heat, I Spit on Your Corpse (yes, the sleazy follow-up to I Spit on Your Grave!), Candy Tangerine Man, and Russ Meyer's Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. In 1992, he got back to his roots with a part in The Bikini Car Wash Company. Curiously, almost all his roles cast him as a coach, a cop, or a creepy in-law. Cheerleader Kimbery Hyde went on to star in a couple of those naughty nurse movies as well. So if cheap guilty titillation, sleazy and morally disgusting situations, and near-constant nudity are all you are looking for, The Cheerleaders deliver with a tremendously spirited holler. If, however, you are looking for world-class cheerleader routines, then yeah, you better watch Bring it On. Am I finished with cheerleader movies? Well, almost. For a genre I said I didn't like, I sure do seem to like it a lot. Well, we have HOTS and The Pom Pom Girls to get through, and then I think we'll just about be done and ready to move on to mor eimportant genres, like naughty nurse movies. You know, I figured if I was going to write about cheerleader films, then I should at least do it in a way that allows me to put "The authority in sleazy cheerleader movies" under the Teleport City name. Labels: Cheerleaders, Netflix Diary, Sexploitation, Year: 1973 posted by Keith at 6:57 PM | 0 Comments Wednesday, August 25, 2004Revenge of the Cheerleaders
1977, United States. Starring Jerii Woods, Cheryl Smith, Helen Lang, Patrice Rohmer, Susie Elene, Eddra Gale, William Bramley, Norman Thomas Marshall, Regina Gleason, Carl Ballantine, Fred Gray, Carrie Dietrich, Sheri Meyers. Directed by Richard Lerner. Available on DVD from Amazon.
Hey, wait a second. Didn't I just say I didn't like cheerleader movies all that much? You'd think that would be a good reason for me not to go indulging in one after the other. But maybe I don't like cheerleader films that much because I'd never seen this one. Where as Jack Hill's earlier effort makes some attempt at, if not being a good movie, at least being a movie. Revenge of the Cheerleaders completely lacks any pretense at being meaningful, political, social, or redeeming in any way and instead revels in being a cheap, sleazy piece of exploitive crap. As such, I liked it a whole lot more. Revenge of the Cheerleaders answers the call for a movie in which a young and exhausted basketball-playing David Hasselhoff is revived by sniffing a cheerleader's worn panties. That's pretty much the cultural high point in this lurid tale of high school cheerleaders who frequently flash the full frontal while trying to save their scummy high school from greedy land developers. Yeah, high school. Remember when you could make taudry teen sex comedies jam-packed with nakedness coming from people pretending to be high schoolers? I'm pretty sure that would get you arrested today, but that's why we love the 1970s. You could call a twenty-something actress sixteen and cram your sex farce full of nudity. I think now maybe if you're lucky they'll flash a boob, but that's about it. It's part of what irritates me about the "tame by today's standards" phrase that so many people throw around. Considering how repressed and timid modern films have become, the continued issuance of this utterance baffles me. Our films today are far more prudish and the violence far more cartoonish and bloodless than anything that came in the '70s or even '80s. Just because things have gotten louder, dumber, and more overblown doesn't mean they've pushed the envelope, and while there's no end to the number of booty short shots we'll cram into a film, nudity has become a rare event, and even when it does turn up, it's pretty meek. Not that I'd, umm, say that Revenge of the Cheerleaders isn't dumb, but it is a perfect example of what you could get away with in the ultra-permissive 1970s that would get you drawn and quartered today. Wrong as it is, this is the sort of sleaze I grew up sneaking peeks at as a wee lad. Watching a movie like this is like getting a visit from an old, hot friend and staying up all night waxing nostalgic about the time you dumped the pot in the cafeteria chili. It's much better and more daring than the sex comedies that would roll around in the 1980s, and needless to say, infinitely better than what passes for teen sex comedy today, if for no other reason than it doesn't skimp on anything but the outfits.
Once again, the story is threadbare and simple. Aloha High School in Aloha, California, is a dump. The students have sex and smoke pot on the front lawn, the principal is insane, and the head nurse is fat and surly. Reining over the madness are the Aloha High cheerleading squad and the star basketball player and plaything, Boner. Yes, that's David Hasselhoff in his first film, starring as a character named Boner whom we first meet as he emerges dazed, tired, but triumphant from a bout of sweet, sweet hanky panky in a stall in the girls' bathroom. He can do it all: shoot hoops, make love 'til the wee hours of the morn, dance up a storm, and show off his ability to play second fiddle either to a sassy talking car or a beautiful pair of bouncing boobs - all talents that would come in handy later in his career when he was still playing second fiddle to boobs and dancing atop the crumbling remnants of the Berlin Wall. If Aloha High gets closed, they'll all have to go to tough inner city school Lincoln High, where the thugs and sociopaths rule the roost but can be robbed of their drugs by spunky teen cheerleaders armed with a fire extinguisher. They may be tough, but they also know that flame retardant foam can really wreak havoc on a leather jacket. The plot doesn't even kick in until the last twenty minutes, sot he movie before that is filled with nothing but glorious 1970s nudity and hijinks. There's the ol' blowjob behind the food counter routine as the guy tries to serve some lady a banana split. There's skinny-dipping. There's lots of dancing. There's even an orgy in the guys' locker room shower, which fills with suds for some reason, probably so Black Belt Jones can go in there later and do some fighting. Most of the humor is funny only for how unfunny it is, which I find is true of many if not most comedies. A stoned dude snorting Parmesan cheese, the classic "hot girl fellaciating a banana," and Boner being revived by the enticing aroma of worn panties is about as sophisticated as things get. No one, I hope, will be rolling on the floor with laughter. And yet, it's the fact that the film is so simplistic, so completely devoid of grace or wit that makes it funny. Sometimes, when someone who isn't funny tries to be, the results are disastrous. In the case of Revenge of the Cheerleaders, it's so unfunny and lunkheaded that it almost achieves a state of hilarity. A lot of movies are unintentionally funny. This one was intentionally trying to be funny, and the fact that it isn't is what's funny about it. Does that make any sense at all? No? Well, in that case, it has a lot of nudity. And I mean a lot. Is it going to surprise anyone if I say that the acting is as good as the script? There are, if one was to be kind a couple acceptable performances, but a lot of what's being said and done just feel like improvisation by people who have no idea how to improvise, all delivered with the razor sharp skill of an actual stoned high schooler. So I guess maybe there's some degree of cinema verite realism in Revenge of the Cheerleaders, years before that "shocking" movie Kids terrified us all with the revelation that young teens are smoking pot, having sex, and engaging in excruciatingly long-winded and moronic conversations. I'd certainly rather watch Revenge of the Cheerleaders than that. At least Revenge of the Cheerleaders has David Hasselhoff and the brothers breaking it down on the dance floor with some hot Rerun-esque moves.
Speaking of Hoff, he's about as good here as any bad actor is in his first screen role. What's amazing is how little he's improved since Revenge of the Cheerleaders. I mean, it's quite damning to say a movie is so shoddy that even David Hasselhoff probably leaves it off his resume, but it's not like he's given us much that's better since then. His best films remain Revenge of the Cheerleaders and Star Crash, and only Revenge of the Cheerleaders flirts with the full frontal Hasselhoff nudity so many middle-aged German women demand. The only other "name" star in this film is Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith, who made something of a career out of appearing naked in cheerleader movies. Here' she appears pregnant and naked, smoking pot and drinking while her baby is a mere three months away from birth. Look, it's not like you can expect prenatal responsibility from a movie where cheerleaders dump pot in the chili to cause a schoolwide orgy and food fight. Smith really has very little to do in this film despite already being a veteran of The Swinging Cheerleaders and Pom Pom Girls. But hey, any movie that features a naked pregnant teen cheerleader cavorting in the boys' locker room with David Hasselhoff has to be good for America, right? The strangest thing about this film is the bizarre finale in which the heroic cheerleaders take on the greedy developers in a labyrinthine underground compound that looks right out of a James Bond film. Or rather, right out of a very cheap James Bond rip-off. The big fat nurse blows up the school, only without the help of the Ramones, sinks in quicksand, but is somehow redeemed in the end as the cheerleaders run through an endless series of cardboard space-age doorways and chambers. Eventually, everyone gives up on the plot and has a big luau with nude dancing and more "Hasselhoff gets funky with the brothers" stuff. Yep, it's pretty bad. This is the sort of exploitive skin flick you should be ashamed of watching. There's really no justifying it with "it's a bold look at women seizing sexual power," or essays on how our heroic cheerleaders are both sexually and racially progressive as their ranks contain all races getting along in perfect, naked harmony. No, it's just hot women taking off cheerleader outfits while David Hasselhoff dances. I mean, his name is Boner! If you're not making out with your honey in the back seat of a muscle car at the drive-in while this is playing, then there's really no good excuse for watching it. The plot is awful. The characters are awful. The acting is awful. But the nudity is ever so fine, and David Hasselhoff is called Boner. Any movie that features nudity during the credits also gets bonus points from us. It's hilariously unfunny, utterly absurd, sleazy, cheap, and unredeemable. So yeah, I thought it was pretty good. I'd much rather watch this than Bring it On. Labels: Cheerleaders, Netflix Diary, Sexploitation, Year: 1977 posted by Keith at 6:32 PM | 0 Comments Swinging Cheerleaders
1974, United States. Starring Jo Johnston, Colleen Camp, Jodi Carlson, Ric Carrott, Sandy Dempsey, Jack Denton, Ron Hajek, Rosanne Katon, Mae Mercer, Bob Minor, John Quade, Ian Sander, Cheryl Smith, Jason Sommers, George Wallace. Directed by Jack Hill. Available on DVD from Amazon
Yeah, remember cheerleader movies? They don't make them much now, but back in the 1970s there was a whole glut of them, thanks primarily to low-budget film tornado Roger Corman, who also gave the country an equally impressive avalanche of "naughty nurse" movies. Now I've been to hospitals and seen a lot of nurses but have never seen one whom I'd like to see be naughty. Cheerleaders, on the other hand, are a much safer bet, though I will state that, unlike many members of my sex, I never developed a thing for them. I was too busy being into punk rock and courting strange gypsy-like d-rock girls to be interested in clean-cut young ladies urging me to show my spirit. That was back in the days when cheerleaders performed cheers instead of just coming out from time to do dance routines to out of date dance hits or something by Justin Timberlake. Likewise, I never much got into cheerleader films, not that I had easy access to them as a kid. That was in the era before cable television and VCRs, so if I wanted to see cinematic boobs, I had to go over to my friend's house who had the big satellite dish in the back yard. And generally, we turned to sleazy barbarian movies for our nudity fix, because then it also came wrapped in a package with guys waving swords in each other's faces while they talked about wizards. But it's not like I was ever opposed to watching a cheerleader movie when it came on. Yes, my arm could be twisted, and if you insisted, I'd sit through the shower scenes and party scenes in the name of…umm…I don't know. Research? Acquiring a well-rounded film education? Beats me. Of all the cheerleader movies, The Swinging Cheerleaders has the most promising title and, oddly enough, is the least sleazy and exploitive of the bunch. Chalk that one up to director Jack Hill, who was a master of injecting cheap exploitation with some actual storytelling and interesting characters. He's best known as the director on Pam Grier's two best films, Coffy and Foxy Brown, and he worked on a slew of Corman productions. This isn't one of his better films, but it's a better film for his participation, if that makes any sense. It's a smarter, perhaps more politically aware cheerleader exploitation film than the others, but it's also a duller one. Funny enough, it was passed off on cable from time to time as a sequel to the idiotically enjoyable cheerleader sleaze H.O.T.S., even though The Swinging Cheerleaders was made a full decade before that film. And you thought that kind of thing only happened to Bruce Lee.
The plot is simple enough: radical campus reporter Kate (Jo Johnston) wants to do a story on how cheerleading degrades women. So naturally, she goes undercover as a cheerleader. Luckily, even though she's a college feminist and all-around radical, she also has a full arsenal of polished cheerleading skills. After infiltrating their ranks and gaining their trust, she discovers that most of the cheerleaders are actually quite nice, and some of the football players are good guys. Her radical boyfriend, on the other hand, turns out to be a grade-A heel even though his Art Garfunkle hair marks him as a sensitive guy. Kate also uncovers a plot to fix the football games, and of course, everyone gets involved in busting up the racket while also having to urge the players to push 'em back, push 'em back, way back. So points to Hill for trying to do something a little different and perhaps even more meaningful with a subgenre that was made for drive-in exploitation. I think the film's claims to be a celebration of women's lib and sexual equality is a little dubious, but that was a common ploy and so remains to today where every cheap exploitive film about a woman in a skimpy leather outfit is trumpeted as "the story of a woman taking charge of her own sexuality" so long as she kicks a guy in the balls with her stiletto heels at some point. I think they even tried to pass off Showgirls as a feminist triumph before just giving up and giving it the tagline, "The movie where that chick from Saved by the Bell gives the dude from Twin Peaks a lapdance."
Hill's script, which is credited to two female writers but was, apparently, slapped together by Hill himself along with help from a friend, is surprisingly well-plotted, and one incident leads well into the next. That doesn't mean a lot of it doesn't get a bit boring, though. Frat parties are really only fun to watch if they involve John Belushi smashing thing or Snoop Dogg with a video camera taking a group of girls into the back room. Likewise, there are a lot of scenes of people sitting around talking about sex without actually having it. Just about everyone in their cast shows their boobs at some point, with the exception of "name" co-star Colleen Camp. Though previous and subsequent cheerleader movies wouldn't shy away from the full frontal shots, this one has none. So, I don't know. You can let your teenagers watch it or something. Hill's story is typically schizophrenic, something that was a trademark of his. At time slapstick comedy, at time poorly-choreographed action film, and at times misguided drama, The Swinging Cheerleaders certainly has parts that keep it from being a completely lightweight and easy-to-enjoy romp, but at the same time the "serious" moments are so cartoonishly overdrawn that it's impossible to take them as seriously as they might or might not want you to.
The acting, like the script, is better that you'd expect. No one's in danger of becoming acclaimed on account of their performance, but very few people are risking being thought of as completely awful. And best of all, Rosanne Katon is in the film. I first fell for her while watching the otherwise wretched Ebony, Ivory, and Jade, where Jade dies early and gets replaced by another Ebony, but I guess they couldn't call the film Ebony, Ivory, and a Little More Ebony. She's cute as hell and always energetic, and is one of the best actresses in this film. Lead Jo Johnston is okay as well, and her sleazy boyfriend is easy to hate. Read whatever politics you will into the fact that the liberated radical gets off on exploiting women while the star quarterback is revealed to have a heart of gold. I think it's less a comment on the disillusionment with campus activism and more a statement of the fact that sometimes athletes are nice and hippies are dicks. Overall, I'm left with very little to say about the film. It's the ultimate in disposable drive-in fare and a fine example of Hill's knack for taking brainless exploitation and trying to invest at least a little heart into things. Still, it's not really that interesting of a movie to me, and though it would have been a great double-feature to catch at the drive-in or as a kid late at night sneaking a peek on cable, it's not the sort of film that can hold my interest for very long. Still, I'd rather watch this than a hundred more recent "erotic thrillers." At least it has some intelligence and a weird sense of humor. I'd rather watch this thank Bring it On, but just barely. Labels: Cheerleaders, Netflix Diary, Sexploitation, Year: 1974 posted by Keith at 6:28 PM | 0 Comments |
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