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The Swinging Cheerleaders
[Anchor Bay]
1974; color
Directed by Jack Hill
Starring: Colleen Camp, Rosanne Katon, Jo Johnston, Rainbeaux Smith, Ron Hajek & Ric Carrott
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I'm kinda surprised at Jack Hill for this one. Even though Swinging Cheerleaders is definitely within his sexploitation oeuvre, it just doesn't measure up to typical Hill fare. This improbable plot—aw hell, what movie like this DOESN'T have an improbable, if not flat out outrageously impossible plot?—takes place on that hotbed of swingin' '70s action, the college campus, where a female journalism student decides to infiltrate what she deems the most exploitative and demeaning order on campus, the cheerleading squad. Interestingly enough, the mythical Mesa State, where the action takes place, seems to be a college consisting solely of one classroom, one hallway, one locker room, and one 100,000 seat stadium. (Seriously, with the exception of the opening and closing credits, which are blimp shots of something like the Rose Bowl packed to capacity, it's like the rest of this film was shot on parts of a high school campus with a dinky football field and ramshackle bleachers.) Then again, it's Jack Hill so we have to assume he wasn't given much of a budget to work with in the first place. At any rate, the girl's plan is to infiltrate the pom-pom sorority and write an exposé on the group's activities. (Dubbing the article "The Swinging Cheerleaders," hence the film's title.) She has a change of heart, however, once she begins warming up to the other girls and realizing not all jocks are cavemen. At some point she also stumbles onto a story that is actually exposé-worthy, the fact that the college's football games are being fixed as part of a betting ring involving, among others, the coach and the head of the alumni association. Soon enough we're on a train to sub-plot city, where a panoply of stereotypes gets their own unnecessary mini story line. There's the campus radical, who starts off as the boyfriend of the journalism student and winds up the ringleader of a plan to gang-rape one of the other cheerleaders; the token black cheerleader, who's having an affair with the token black professor (he in turn is sleeping with her behind the back of his angry, blade-wielding wife); and the starting quarterback, who ends up discovering he has principles when he refuses to throw "the big game." This last sub-plot leads to said QB being detained by campus police (AKA the filmic versions of Springfield's finest, Eddie and Lou) and forced to down a bottle of bourbon. (I think the idea is that he'll then be too loaded to play.) He winds up being saved by a portion of the football team, who drag him back to the stadium in an attempt to finish - and, of course, win - the game. Actually, they hold him upside down over the side of a VW Bug during the ride to get him to puke himself sober. Which we assume he does, as it's implied over the end credits that the team has in fact rallied to victory. The end.
—The Kommandant
Click here to read more of our tribute to Jack Hill, So Hard To Kill, So Easy To Love.
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