Revenge Served Warm
What do cheerleaders really do? Would it really make any difference if football players didn't have girls in short skirts jumping around nearby? To find out, I watched 1976's Revenge of the Cheerleaders which answered my questions with hazy affection. This badly edited film with loitering performances gathers some beautiful women who were apparently asked to look happy and naked.
Really, the most remarkable thing going on in this film is how happy and relaxed all these high school students are. Everyone just hangs around, has sex, smokes, or aimlessly wanders.
Here Gail (Jerii Woods) and Sesame (Patrice Rohmer) wander the woods wearing only identical merkins before they're frisked by a police officer. Sesame--even her name says "open"--seems to have the hardest time of the group keeping her top on. Mainly she seems to like David Hasselhoff, who probably thinks this is the lowest point of his career.
But all the cheerleaders like to sleep around, something that has earned the high school the reputation of having a "morality problem", which is aimed to be solved by merging the school with its cross town rival, Lincoln. Which figures into a completely nonsensical scheme by some hastily sketched middle aged businessmen types to make a mall or something.
Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith appears in the film as one of the cheerleaders, her status in exploitation films securing her a role despite being visibly very pregnant.
This movie has a kind of bad editing you just don't see anymore thanks to computers. It's like watching undersea creatures the way scenes begin or end with people dumbly smiling or fumfering around before abruptly launching into dialogue that seems like it was improvised by people who've received generous anaesthetic. Which it probably was.
Mostly people don't talk at all. There's a phony vigour in the sex and the sports but mostly everyone floats along through the movie, not letting the plot get them too excited one way or the other. It's more like an aquarium than a movie. I guess the cheerleaders do effect some kind of revenge; at one point they seem really happy while the businessmen seem upset.
Twitter Sonnet #842
The modem mind reboots too often late.
As night advanced beyond the ken of hair
The head was capped in poor analogue pate.
A careful ticket slipped beneath the stair.
A brief reminder of a little case:
Too small to hold a coat or all your pants,
Instead, you'll find your files, pens, and mace.
And maybe sandwiches covered with ants.
The chaff was perched atop the weather vane.
A flake of oat has fallen by the bowl.
A comb combined the hair and bristled mane.
An icy tip betrays the bergy whole.
A ragged coat outnumbered rich wardrobes.
You'll find escape pods inside the snow globes.