The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974)

 

Director: Jack Hill

Screenplay: Jack Hill (as Jane Witherspoon) and David Kidd (as Betty Conklin)

Cast: Jo Johnston as Kate; Cheryl Smith as Andrea; Colleen Camp as Mary Ann; Rosanne Katon as Lisa; Ron Hajak as Buck; Ric Carrott as Ross; Jason Sommers as Prof. Thorpe; Ian Sander as Ron; George Wallace as Mr. Putnam; Jack Denton as Coach Turner

Ephemeral Waves

 

Oh my cod, my cod!

The Swinging Cheerleaders is not a good film. Actually, it is an insanely dated and dull production, not quite a sexploitation production, not quite action either. Not really much of a high school football narrative either, though that makes up a huge part of the production and initially promises a bit with the zoom in on a sports stadium and a montage at the beginning of the movie. I say all this as a fan of Spider Baby (1968), another early production by cult filmmaker Jack Hill, a really interesting pulpy horror film which threw back to the past by casting Lou Chaney Jr. in one of his last films alongside looking to the future. He is held in high regard for his blaxploitation films, iconic because of his casting of Pam Grier, but he is a journeyman director who worked in multiple genres, which means he has worked in many areas throughout his career that would be of interest. Sadly The Swinging Cheerleaders did not succeed.

It is a fascinating artefact in principal, as cheerleaders (whilst they exist outside the United States) are an inherently American pop culture concept which I grew up with in various forms since childhood but as an inherently alien concept. Note that, whilst male cheerleaders exists, it is usually always female cheerleaders that are depicted, where they can exist in multiple forms - as parodies, as tropes, as archetypes, as figures of the popular students in American high school, and as figures of sexual desire, the latter significant in this case. Naturally, as a sexploitation film, the interest is in a female cast of sexy cheerleaders, even if by logic they are meant to be high school students and underage, thus adding a creepy edge.

The premise is that a liberal feminist plans to sneak into the team to write an expose, which will inevitably lead to her changing her mind about becoming part of the team. It actually feels like a plot from a 2000s Hollywood film, like when Miss Congeniality (2000) with Sandra Bullock was about the Miss America competition. Whilst there are attempts at giving the female cast some gumption and independence, it is noticeable that the female writers are actually pseudonyms for male one, and that they do not succeed entirely from creating fully formed female figures. There are definitely moments where they did not think through ideas or are absolutely of the time, such as when the feminist will suddenly want to have sex and romantically linked to the lead player, despite their first interaction with him asking her for sex on the introduction and coming off as a pig.

The men in general are pigs here. It is a plot-based one at times - as there is illegal fixing of games for gambling among the teachers - but there is also a lot of scuzziness played for humour. The coach is a horn dog perving on young woman, making up a lot of this, whilst the lead player comes off first as utterly unlikable in the modern day despite the later attempts to write him off as much more sympathetic. The lead female character's initial boyfriend, a liberal left winger, adds an odd reactionary slant as he comes off as a spineless deviant the more you learn of him, beaten up by the police in protests but here, when his girlfriend leaves him, showing himself to be a rat. Even the one likable character of the main cast, an African American maths teacher ("I want you to take your mind off permutations") is sleeping with one of the students, regardless of the fact that he has a change of heart of helping with the gambling when a moral pass is approaching that he refuses to break. Married, there is a really lurid sequence, one of the only few explicit ones in the film, where his wife, a really striking and deep voiced older woman, threatens his young girlfriend with a flick knife in a school corridor.

Much of the film, beyond this, drags on. The set decorator was having fun - peacock feathers, skeleton in a cheerleader outfit and seventies posters, all in one scene - but this is as conventionally put together as you can get with an exceptionally glacial pace. It realty is not that explicit in the sex either, as whilst it has some topless nudity, making it quite a quaint film. Even when it starts to get ahead, the tone is so cheerful that the one scene of note, a tumble between corrupt campus cops and the football players, should have shown that the film should have moved closer to the football and more pacey hijinks, completely ditching the sex appeal and becoming a more family friendly farce. Instead, the film is so quaint that, not only does it feel dull, but also skips over a lot of problematic content blithely. The film casually skips over what is effectively a gang rape in the plot line for one of the biggest examples of this, where a female cheerleader wishes to lose her virginity and accidentally encounters the male liberal rat, the content implied and never shown, but The Swinging Cheerleaders just casually dropping the event with the characters merely seeing that she now has a hangover and her love interest just beating the other male character up.

Even without this scene, that light tone is still dull. This fully embraces one of my biggest grievances when films stick adamantly to their plot without extra flair even if said plot is generic. So much that, honestly, this last paragraph is going to be this short and end here as there is not a lot I personally found of interest in this film.