The Cheerleaders Box Set

Introduction

Cheerleaders have been a staple of American sexuality since the 1950s, with nubile young girls in croptops, short skirts and pompoms performing acrobatic routines as the face of whatever sporting team they represent. There were three Cheerleaders films in the 1970s: The Cheerleaders, Revenge of the Cheerleaders and The Swinging Cheerleaders which were released by Anchor Bay in the US in 2003. Now two of these, The Cheerleaders and Revenge of the Cheerleaders, make it to DVD here courtesy of Arrow Films in The Cheerleaders Box Set.

The Cheerleaders begins with two of the senior and sluttier girls looking for a new member of the team - one that won't end up in the maternity ward - and, upon learning that Jeannie (Stephanie Fondue), a nerdy girl is, shock-horror, a virgin, they conspire to get her on the team with her chastity as a wager between the two girls. If she keeps it for the season, one of them must sleep with the perverted old janitor and if she loses it then the other has to sleep with Norm, the braindead equipment manager.

Now, this isn't much of a story and is particularly strange considering these aren't even college girls, they're still at high school so the third act involves an orgy an Jeannie's house where the cheerleaders sleep with the whole football team, knackering them out and ensuring that they can't play properly the next day. The ingenious solution is to find the opposing team's roster and sleep their way through that as well!

Richard Lerner, the Director of Photography on the first Cheerleaders film, revisited the franchise three years later with an even flimsier script. Somehow revolving around the out-of-control cheerleading squad at Aloha High, whose behaviour has drawn the attention of the school board who consider the only solution is a merger with the preppy Lincoln Vocational, their arch-rivals.

What happens from here on in doesn't really follow a coherent narrative, but a series of tenuously related scenes such as the school inspectors getting high on spiked spaghetti sauce, a ridiculously foamy shower and a Scooby-Doo-like chase scene around a huge model dinosaur. It also includes one of David Hasselhoff's first screen appearances as the star basketball player and I can imagine the shower scenes in which he's involved will get some attention and playback.

Video

These are clearly not from the best stock and probably haven't been cared for meticulously in the past 30+ years but they are, after all, cheap exploitation skin flicks, so a bit of grain and dirt almost adds to the charm!

The quality differs throughout the films with some scenes looking better than those that preceded them and some increases in grain and reduction in clarity occurs almost at random, but that's par for the course with this sort of film.

Audio

Like the picture, there's nothing to write home about, apart from the bizarrely funky and almost blaxploitation soundtrack on the first film, duplicated to a lesser extent in Revenge... There's plenty of moaning and orgasmic outbursts which come across quite clearly and the dialogue is clear enough in both films.

Extra Features

The solitary piece of supplementary material is a trailer for The Cheerleaders on that disc, with Revenge... being completely vanilla.

Conclusion

The first I heard of The Cheerleaders was when the trailer appeared on the Grindhouse Trailer Classics 2 disc, accompanied by all sorts of weird and wonderful films as Don't Answer the Phone, Sister Street Fighter and The Black Gestapo. In the midst of all these violent and bizarre exploitation films, the trailer for The Cheerleaders seemed a little incongruous, but nevertheless amusing.

Having now watched the film (and its sequel), it is worthy of such company with absolutely no attempt at good taste, reasonable acting or a script that gives a damn about good story-telling! What it does contain is plenty of naked jailbait and some extremely uncomfortable scenes, played for laughs, but basically showing rape in various guises. This may be looking back at a different era with a more cynical eye, but what else are you to make of Jeannie's initiation where she has to take a shower in the boys' locker room and the football players know exactly what's going on ("New cheerleader" one says to another with a wink) and she just about escapes from a gangrape.

Morals aside, The Cheerleaders is amusing if only because it is so outrageous: Jeannie is told to dress sexily by putting on some old clothes she had when she was twelve and were adorning her teddy bear. There's also the obvious joke of her boyfriend working at the Beaver Car Wash where you get a choice of Big Beaver or Little Beaver Wash.

Revenge of the Cheerleaders is less amusing, with less nudity and less going on (if that were possible). The sub-plot of property dealing amongst the school board by trying to get Aloha High shut down sits uneasily with such low-brow entertainment but seeing a gangly Hoff as the star basketball player and school stud is almost worth watching for.

Neither of these will gain widespread fame or nostalgia - certainly the uncomfortable sexual politics don't help - but there probably are fans of low-brow to no-brow bawdy sex comedies who'll get a kick out of these even if they are far less accomplished that the Porky's ones and that's saying something!