Review by Ben Bussey.
Gimme a T! Gimme an R! Gimme an A! Gimme an S! Gimme an H! What’s that spell? Do you like it? If so, then here’s a DVD you just might be interested in. We’ve got lithe young women of the 1970s in ra-ra skirts, riding around in convertibles with the top down and their tops off, getting away with anything and everything they want. You can probably guess what a great deal of that involves. With this double bill DVD (strangely sold on the first film alone, with Revenge of the Cheerleaders basically included as an extra), Arrow’s new label Arrowdrome continues in their mission to bring cult oddities galore into this digital era of ours, catering to an even more niche audience than their existing Arrow Video range. Unsurprisingly, this one has been released under the Arrowdrome Erotic sub-label.
Are you sitting comfortably with your pizza, beer and/or illicit substances? Then we’ll begin. The Cheerleaders (1973, Paul Glicker) takes place at the sunny, All-American high school of Amarosa, whose football team has an unprecedented success record, owing largely to the motivational powers of their cheerleaders. Enjoying popularity and power beyond that of mere mortals, the cheerleaders pretty much run the school, if not the whole town. Timid virgin Jeannie (the gloriously named Stephanie Fondue) wants a taste of that action, so when she makes the team it’s a dream come true; at last she will know what it is to be recognised, admired, and of course to get laid.
So it’s Debbie Does Dallas all over again, I hear you ask? Well, not exactly. This is more sex comedy than outright porno. Rather than hardcore rumpy-pumpy we have an emphasis on ludicrous sight gags (e.g. Ms Fondue being washed through a door on a tidal wave of semen) and sledgehammer-subtle innuendo (e.g. the signature cheer: “Come on boys! Come on boys! Come! Come! Come! Come! Come on boys!”) Naturally the performances are laboured, the plot is virtually non-existent, the entire cast looks at least five years too old for school, and everyone drops their pants and indulges in some thoroughly unconvincing pelvis-bumping at least once every few minutes, usually to the sound of wah-wah fuelled guitar. Bow chicka wow wow, and so forth.
Perhaps what makes the film most interesting – indeed, this can be said of 70s sexploitation in general – is how clearly it indicates that attitudes have changed over the years. For starters, at the risk of sounding cruel and sexist, the cheerleaders themselves are light years apart from the sculpted, waxed, surgically enhanced young women that constitute screen sex sirens today. To recall a time when there wasn’t quite the same pressure for women to match a particular physical standard in order to be deemed attractive makes a refreshing change, truth be told. (The men, of course, are as unattractive as they’ve always been in films like this.) Not that it’s all such pleasant nostalgia, however. Maybe this is my English stiff-upper-lip (yes, I said upper lip) speaking, but the sheer amount of casual rape jokes are quite jaw-dropping. We have an attempted gang rape in the shower, a bus driver molested whilst driving, a creepy janitor spying on the girls and doing his best to abduct them at every opportunity, and Brandy Woods recounting how she lost her virginity to a gas station attendant at 13. Sure, sex comedies are supposed to push the boundaries of taste and decency, but good grief, it’s almost enough to make me sign up for the Festival of Light and demand a return to old fashioned family values.
By contrast, Revenge of the Cheerleaders (1976, Richard Lerner, also known as Caught With Their Pants Down) is a slightly less risqué affair. It’s still not one to watch with mother, unless she’s particularly into that sort of thing, but there’s a lot less emphasis on sex in favour of… whisper it… a plot. This time around our heroines are the cheerleaders of the Aloha High School basketball team (enabling them to cheer, “get it up, get it up, get it up, up, up!”) whose debauched antics and disregard for authority have sent their school into dire straits and facing a merger with their arch rivals Lincoln Vocational. However, the cheerleaders discover there’s a nefarious conspiracy afoot, so they take it upon themselves to solve the mystery and save their school. It’s a premise that lends itself to broad humour and cartoonish goings-on aplenty; indeed, it’s uncannily similar to that of the recent British kid flick Horrid Henry, but with a bit more nudity and stoner jokes.
A curious feature of this film is that, rather than fill in the dead spaces with sex scenes as you might expect, Revenge of the Cheerleaders throws in gratuitous dance sequences. In contrast with its predecessor, here the actresses actually seem to have an idea how to cheerlead, and when they’re not doing that, they break into impromptu choreographed pieces in the diner, on the school front steps, and more besides. One excessively soapy shower scene apart, they spend more time dancing with the boys than doing the other. And yes, in this instance the basketball team has one member of particular note: a young David Hasselhoff, boasting the glorious character name of Boner, standing a good foot higher than everyone else and looking wigged out of his brain for the duration. You might also be interested in the presence of the late Rainbeaux Smith, sometime B-movie star and drummer with Joan Jett, who – astonishingly, given the content of the film – was heavily pregnant at the time.
Given that these are but two of a series of four films (the other two being Jack Hill’s The Swinging Cheerleaders, and Jeff Werner’s Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend), I’m not sure if we can expect more pom-pom thrusting action coming to DVD anytime soon, but if you’re after a bit of old school midnight movie fun you could certainly do a lot worse than these. Why, you might say they make for quite a tasty pair.
Arrowdrome releases The Cheerleaders/Revenge of the Cheerleaders to DVD on 24th October.