Saturday, April 19, 2014

"Revenge of the Cheerleaders" (1976) d/Richard Lerner

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Anybody that can't get a few cheap kicks out of a good vintage teenage sex comedy from the seventies is either dead inside or harbors some deep-seated resentment towards young people having a blast a la Dennis the Menace's drape neighbor, Mr. Wilson, that old fuddy-duddy. High school serves as a good diving board towards embarking on a lifetime tour as a partying wildman from Borneo if you play it the right way; my only regrets are that I didn't pull more shit back then than I did. Had dimepiece genre chicks like Rainbeaux Smith, Penthouse Pet Helen Lang, Jerii Woods, Patricia Rohmer, and Susie Elene gone to my school, I probably would have thought about dosing the coffee pot in the teacher's lounge to score some pom-pom poonany, but at my school, it wouldn't have affected most of the drug addict bastards one bit! Or so I heard...

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You German readers see anything in this screen cap you like?
 At Aloha High (Cali, Hawaii, what's the difference), you can pretty much do whatever you want, maaaan. The school maintains a constant anarchy and healthy buzz thanks to it's cheerleading squad (Lang, Woods, Pohmer, Elene, and Smith in the latest stages of pregnancy possible), who spend their days getting high, fucking, and lazily executing corny choreographed disco dance numbers with the rhythmically-challenged "Boner" (Hasselhoff) and the basketball team, when they aren't infiltrating rival school Lincoln Tech, holding the students hostage with a fire extinguisher while robbing them of their narcotics and booze, leading to the inevitable altered states cafeteria food fight (I was never a big 'food fight' guy, always found that kinda gross)/ mid-day bubble bath gym shower orgy with state inspectors in attendance, no less.

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So that's where the peanuts in a CMP sundae come from...
Now that you've stopped pissing yourself laughing at the care-free hijinks that would get you expelled/prosecuted/jailed (in that order) in today's era of fake tolerance, let's get to the meat of the story. Except, it's more like a pink meat paste substitute, in this case. A greedy land baron by the name of Hartlander (William Bramley) has his beady eye set on Aloha, with plans to bulldoze it and turn it into one of those awful shopping malls, and worse, his ambitions will force a school merger with the rival gearheads from Lincoln. To speed up the process, he even contracts out Aloha's evil nurse (Eddra Gale) as a spy/ kidnapper, who abducts their beloved principal, leading to the inescapable chase sequence in and out of the massive dinosaur sculpture in the Cali desert that you last saw in Pee Wee's Big Adventure (1985) and some ambitious spatial reasoning leads to the consequential Bronson Caves, which just so happen to lead to Hartlander's mall HQ. Of course, they save the day in the end, and a parting shot reveals Heather is no longer pregnant, proudly holding her newborn son for the cameras (Smith's real-life son, Justin). Awwww...

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"Heaven smells kinda salmon-y..."
It's become pretty trendy for everyone to get their cheap jollies by shitting on Hasselhoff for his early "work" (I say work, because his scenes are pretty much an endurance test for anyone who happens to be watching) here, as though "Knight Rider" and "Baywatch" were the equivalent of Master-fuckin'-piece Theater, ferchrissakes..."Drunk Floor-burger" is the best thing the guy's done, IMHO. Let's not forget a memorable appearance from Carl "McHale's Navy" Ballantine as the most easy going school principal ever committed to celluloid. Still, all the softcore-level promiscuity (there's a sequence between a pair of cheerleaders and a boy scout in the woods that pushes the envelope on that assessment, if you're wondering) and wanton full-frontal nudity in the world can hardly mask the technical ineptitude of tonight's cheapie, a one Wop flick if there ever was one, but then again, nobody's sitting down to this one and expecting Casablanca.

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My favorite Rainbeaux in the spectrum, obviously.
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