Revenge of the Cheerleaders (1976) Monarch Releasing/Comedy RT: 87 minutes Rated R (full frontal nudity, sex, language, drugs, some violence) Director: Richard Lerner Screenplay: Ted Greenwald, Nathaniel Dorsky and Ace Baandage Music: John Sterling Cinematography: Nathaniel Dorsky Release date: May 1976 (US) Cast: Jerii Woods, Rainbeaux Smith, Helen Lang, Patrice Rohmer, Susie Elene, Eddra Gale, William Bramley, Norman Thomas Marshall, Regina Gleason, Carl Ballantine, Fred Gray, Carrie Dietrich, Sheri Meyers, Lillian McBride, Bert Conroy, Garry Walberg, Mike Steele, David Hasselhoff, David Robinson, Lorna Thayer. Box Office: N/A
Rating: ½ *
Revenge of the Cheerleaders is the third part of the Cheerleader Trilogy of 70s even though it’s not really a sequel to either The Cheerleaders or The Swinging Cheerleaders. Plotwise, they have absolutely nothing to do with one another. It’s like Cannon’s Ninja Trilogy of the 80s- Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja and Ninja III: The Domination- except that Sho Kosugi was in all three of them (as different ninja characters). The only player in common in the Cheerleader Trilogy is the late Rainbeaux Smith and she was only in the last two (as different cheerleader characters).
In terms of overall quality, Revenge of the Cheerleaders is closer to The Cheerleaders than The Swinging Cheerleaders. Whereas the latter title has more on its mind than T&A, the former is all about T&A (&B). The same goes for Revenge of the Cheerleaders, a cheersploitation comedy of such low quality, it gives the execrable Hollywood High cause to worry. It’s classless, sleazy, gross, moronic, worthless garbage that doesn’t even have the decency to give the viewers a story worth caring about. It’s shoddily made, badly acted, poorly written and lazily directed. It doesn’t just hit rock-bottom; it falls right through into the abyss. It is all caps B-A-D!
The recycled “plot” of Revenge of the Cheerleaders concerns the cheerleaders at Aloha High trying to save their alma mater from a greedy developer, Walter Hartlander (Bramley, West Side Story), planning to build a shopping mall in its place. To do this, he plans to merge them with their chief rival Lincoln High, a vocational school attended by toughs and delinquents.
If Aloha keeps going the way it is, there’s a good chance the school board will vote in favor of closing the place. It’s like Delta House only a hundred times worse. Nobody ever goes to class; the only thing the student body studies is other student’s bodies. They have sex in the classrooms, in the gym showers, on the campus and even in the halls. It’s not an institution of learning; it’s a freaking orgy! I was expecting to find the Roman emperor Caligula sitting behind the principal’s desk.
While there is a principal and faculty, it’s the cheerleaders that run the place. They are Gail (Woods, Switchblade Sisters), Heather (Smith, The Swinging Cheerleaders), Leslie (Penthouse pet Lang), Sesame (Rohmer, Jackson County Jail) and Tishi (Elene). They have two states of dress, their uniforms or undressed. They get away with murder and everything else including holding up a Lincoln classroom with a fire extinguisher (?!) to steal everybody’s drugs. They’re briefly threatened by Aloha’s new principal Mr. Walker (Marshall) who “fires” them as cheerleaders and replaces them with ones that don’t act up or put out. No wonder the crowd at the basketball game boos them so vigorously.
Let’s go over the “high” points of Revenge of the Cheerleaders even though its aims are clearly the opposite. I already mentioned the classroom holdup scene. The perps take the drugs and drop them all into a huge pot of spaghetti sauce in the school cafeteria. Everybody, of course, gets very high. This includes the three board members there to inspect the school. It leads to a massive food fight, one made extra disgusting by the messy ammo. Note to future filmmakers, if you’re going to put a food fight in your movie, do NOT use spaghetti with sauce. It’s NOT funny, it’s just gross!
Let’s see, what else? There’s a suds-filled orgy scene in the shower room involving cheerleaders, jocks and board members. There are a handful of poorly choreographed, out-of-nowhere dance numbers. Cast members, including a young David Hasselhoff playing a character named “Boner”, break out their worst disco moves. There’s a ball-busting school nurse (Gale, What’s New Pussycat?) in league with the evil developer. It has a class clown (Gray) who specializes in bogus suicide attempts. Funny, he doesn’t look like Bud Cort. There’s a climatic chase scene involving a giant brontosaurus statue, a cave and a golf course filled with quicksand traps.
Revenge of the Cheerleaders has a ton of nudity. It has boobs, butts and bush galore! It has nudity in scenes that don’t even require it. It also has a lot of sex. In one scene, two of the cheerleaders seduce a Boy Scout in the woods after wandering away from a boring field trip. After they’re done with him, they attempt to walk home fully naked only to be stopped by a cop who frisks them. The humor is on the level of a middle school locker room. No, make that the boy’s restroom. For all I know, the script was scrawled on toilet paper by somebody listening to the 12YOs telling each other dirty jokes.
Directed by Richard Lerner (producer of The Cheerleaders), Revenge of the Cheerleaders is technically incompetent, artistically void and morally bankrupt. It takes idiocy to a new degree. It’s not even worth it to go into the acting. Each and every performance is equally embarrassing. Each and every character is a nitwit and a degenerate. One risks losing IQ points watching Revenge of the Cheerleaders. As awful as it is, I can’t help but admire it just a little bit. It know what it is and what it wants to accomplish and goes at it no holds barred. For me, it belongs in the same category as Screwballs, Joysticks and 1982’s Waitress! It’s so damn bad, you have to love it!
