Sick Product of a Sick System

Captivating movie !

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The highlight of CHEERLEADERS' WILD WEEKEND for me was the hot MILF lesbian school nurse played by buxom blonde Courtney Sands (who is not listed as making any other movies :-( ). Her attempted seduction of one of the rich girls by giving her a bath is HOT. The poor girl is afraid and doesn't want to play... even after the villainess exposes her own monumental rib flaps to her! The interruption by one of the male kidnappers is maddening! One wonders if the older dyke would have been successful.The clincher comes when the cheerleaders revolt and the kidnappers are tied up with the girls' underwear. The lesbian kidnapper has her mouth stuffed with her 'target''s panties (!!) and the girl tells her "that's as close as you'll ever get". (Cheers from the audience!)

The 70's cheerleader teen sexploitation sub-genre receives an appropriately sleazy send-off with this satisfyingly tacky effort. The plot is slight, but serviceable enough: three bitter disgruntled former high school football star athletes along with one jock's dippy younger brother and a ruthless lesbian school nurse abduct a bus full of beautiful bimbo cheerleaders. Okay, the story ain't much and the film itself plays out as more of a tense, straightforward suspense thriller rather than the expected goofy innocuous comic romp, but the flick's exemplary trash picture credentials alone make it a worthy addition to this nifty sub-genre. Producer William Osco previously cranked out numerous porno features and later made the enjoyably atrocious toxic waste monster clinker "The Being." Jason Williams, the star of the immortal X-rated sci-fi outing "Flesh Gordon," portrays the hunky head kidnapper. "The Hills Have Eyes" survivor Robert Houston plays another one of the kidnappers. "Penitentiary" series star Leon Isaac Kennedy appears acting under the alias Lee Curtis as a disc jockey (in real life Kennedy worked as a disc jockey prior to embarking on an acting career!). The cheerleaders are played by such scrumptious, often undraped seasoned junk flick veterans as Kristine DeBell (star of the hard-core fairytale offering "Alice in Wonderland"), Elizabeth Halsey (the dirty soft-core musical version of "Cinderella"), Wally Anne Wharton ("Up in Smoke"), Lenka Novak ("Coach," "Vampire Hookers"), Tracy Ann King (a.k.a. Marilyn Joi, "Hammer," "The Kentucky Fried Movie"), and Janie Squire (the skinny-dipper who gets munched at the start of "Piranha"). Jeff Werner's capable direction doesn't skimp on the good stuff: there's more gratuitous nudity than you can shake a pom-pom at, lots of gleefully gross lowbrow humor (the cheerleaders tie all their panties together so they can trip one of their abductors!), a splendidly stinky pseudo-disco score, a tasty lengthy topless beauty contest, pot smoking, hideously bad soft-rock songs, garish cinematography, and an absolute dearth of taste, subtlety and artistic refinement. In short, it's a solid piece of blithely low-grade and hence quite entertaining schlock.

There are a LOT of really awful sexploitation films out there, and normally I would admit that this is one of them. Except that there was ONE SCENE in this film that I found to be REALLY EROTIC, and because of that one scene I'm upping my rating from a "1" to a "9" (my credibility would be completely shot if I went any higher!) One of the other reviewers (lazarillo) mentions a topless beauty contest in which the kidnapped cheerleaders entertain themselves by dancing almost naked. It is during that scene when one of the bad guys grabs one of the girls (a very pretty blonde) whom he has already declared to be his favorite. But the female kidnapper stops him (threatening to shoot him), and then she takes the frightened girl into the bathroom with her, offering to give the girl a bath. The ensuing scene is very tender and soft as she bathes and comforts the girl. As a lesbian seduction scene it was cut short by the appearance by one of the stupid guys, but it was INCREDIBLY EROTIC until that point! I've never seen another sexploitation film come close to matching it. In fact, it was hotter than most XXX films, not that that's saying much.

Outside of some gratuitous nudity, there is precious little to recommend this. This was made by some of the people involved with FLESH GORDON and ALICE IN WONDERLAND, the two mid 70's porno films. Both were released in a hard version and then re-cut and played for years in toned down R versions. CHEERLEADERS features Kristine Debell ( who played Alice ) and Jason Williams ( who played Flesh, and who co-wrote this disaster ), the only other cast member of note is Marilyn Joi. The movie veers wildly between dumb T & A and a ridiculous kidnapping plot, never finding any stable tone or providing any laughs or thrills. In fact, the plot is so ridiculous it's not even worth touching on. The acting is poor all around and the direction is laughable to non existent. Kristine should be the sole reason to watch this but the film fails miserably on this level as well. While top billed, she's barely in this, has very little to say or do, and never gets naked. A huge let down as Kristine was so beautiful back then. She was involved with producer Osco for several years following ALICE and perhaps that relationship allowed her to participate in a T & A film without showing any skin. She would go from this to MEATBALLS and onto bigger things, but her career never caught fire.