BY TIM GREAVES
When I hear the name Jack Hill the first thing that
comes to mind is the roster of gritty exploitationers he shot with Pam Grier – Coffey, Foxy Brown, The Big Doll
House, The Big Bird Cage – or
perhaps the bizarre, comic horrors of Spider
Baby. What my thinking seldom, if ever, gravitates towards is 1974's The Swinging Cheerleaders, one of Hill's
last directorial spins and an altogether rather humdrum bag of tricks.
Preparing an article for
the Mesa College newspaper on what she considers to be the demeaning nature of
cheerleading, student Kate Cory (Jo Johnston, in her only film role) sets out
to get herself selected as a member of the football team's resident
cheerleading squad, alongside Andrea (Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith), Mary Ann
(Colleen Camp) and Lisa (Rosanne Katon). When Mary Ann learns of Kate's true
motives and, worse yet, that their new inductee is making a play for her
boyfriend, ace footballer Buck (Ron Hajak), she's too distracted to notice her
father, the college Dean (George Wallace), is masterminding a get-rich-quick
gambling scheme; in cahoots with the team coach (Jack Denton) and the maths
professor (Jason Sommers), he’s rigging football matches to line his pockets.
Co-written by Hill and Rape Squad scribe David Kidd (under the noms des plumes Jane Witherspoon and
Betty Conklin) and shot in just 12 days, The
Swinging Cheerleaders is a strange one; essentially suffering from a genre
identity crisis, it's thematically all over the shop. Bearing in mind the title
and the premise – not to mention the suggestive promotional poster art – one
could be forgiven for expecting a saucy, gag-fuelled campus comedy in the vein
of an Animal House or a Porky's, and in many respects that seems
to be what Hill was striving for (in fact, he claims that he imagined it as a
'Disney Sex Comedy', whatever that concept
might constitute!); there are a number of situations, some played out with jaunty
musical accompaniment, that are clearly aiming for laughs. However, material
that gives rise to chuckles is patchy at best and much of it frankly isn't
funny at all. But then that's hardly surprising given that it’s sandwiched
between sleaziness more suited to Hill's aforementioned exploitationers, for
example brutish rogue cops force feeding a bottle of liquor to the hero, or
(off screen) gang rape.
What the show cries out
for but sorely fails to muster up is a hefty dose of genuine funnies; the core ingredients are all present and correct – a lecherous coach who leers at cheerleaders’
posteriors through his binoculars, randy male students eager to disrobe their
female classmates, a Dean who’s far from the upstanding pillar his position commands
– it's simply that the measures are all
wrong and the resulting confection leaves a bitter taste on the palate. Thus,
regardless of its pretensions as to otherwise, what The Swinging Cheerleaders ends up as is a lukewarm, borderline
schmaltzy drama, with Kate finally realising that cheerleading isn't such a
terrible thing after all and bagging the football team's star player into the
bargain. One slapstick sequence does
stand out, but for the wrong reasons: As a procession of characters file past a
bad guy, each of them lands a punch on him whilst he just stands there taking
it and going full pelt on theatrical mugging. The scene is so completely out of
step with the rest of the picture that it feels as if it has snuck in from
another film. This off kilter tone carries through to other aspects of the film
too, notably the character of the dodgy Dean, who vacillates between being
genuinely unpleasant (he slaps Mary Ann around when she foul mouths him) and
slipping into moments of pantomime villainy.
Speaking of characters, it
doesn't help that some of them are plain objectionable. Actually, scratch that,
all of them are objectionable. Which
isn’t to say the performers aren’t easy on the eye – particularly Smith (who
first caught this reviewer's attention in The
Incredible Melting Man, in which she loses her shirt and stumbles over a
headless corpse all in the space of a few seconds), Camp (still working today),
future Playboy centrefold (September 1978) Katon, and (for the female audience)
Hajak and Ric Carrott – even if they're prime examples of that cardinal college
movie 'sin' of looking too old to convince as teen students.
Truthfully, were it not for Quentin Tarantino's
enthusiastic flag-waving when he programmed The Swinging Cheerleaders as part of his first film festival back in the mid-90s, I suspect
it's one that may have escaped my attention. And that would be a shame, because
although it's hardly on a par with the cream of Hill’s c.v., despite the prevalent
tang of negativity shrouding this piece, the man himself singles it out from
his oeuvre as the one he most enjoyed working on, which alone makes it worthy
of attention.
The
Swinging Cheerleaders has been released on dual format
Blu-ray and DVD in the UK from Arrow, its unwarranted 18-certificate playing
guilty accomplice to the implication it’s something far more salacious than it
actually is. The presentation itself is derived from a 2K restoration of the
original film elements and on the Blu-Ray under review here the image is
pleasingly bright and colourful with a moderate level of grain present
throughout. The highlight bonus is a feature-accompanying commentary with
the eminently entertaining Hill (moderated by Ejijah Drenner, who works up a
nice rapport with the director). Then, along with an on-camera interview with
Hill and one with DoP Alfred Taylor, there's an old (poorly filmed) interview
with Hill hosted by Johnny Legend, a 2012 Q&A with Hill, Camp and Katon (sadly
it too was amateurishly shot), and some original release TV spots (the tone of
which also misrepresent the film as a laughfest).
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