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| Images courtesy of MVD Rewind Collection |
I love my job. I get
to see so many great films throughout the years. It has proven to be fruitful and educational
as a cinephile wading through movies.
And then there are times like with MVD Rewind Collection’s new port of
Code Red’s 2016 blu-ray of frequent television filmworker Jeff Werner’s 1979
debut sexploitation comedy-thriller film Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend
which is like getting on one’s hands and knees to clean behind the toilet at a
run-down gas station. Incredibly
produced by the great horror-comedy director Chuck Russell (A Nightmare on
Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors; The Blob; The Mask), this
excuse to get a bunch of cheerleaders to disrobe and/or be sexually assaulted
by greasy male captors is a real hunk of sewer scraping grime which only could’ve
emerged in the bizarre wake of regional sex comedies in a post-National
Lampoon’s Animal House landscape.
Movies that thought ripping a woman’s clothes off were tantamount to humor. Trouble is you need context and tonal range,
something Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend has a hard time keeping track of.
Shot under the working title The Great American Girl
Robbery before being released under the titles Bus 17 is Missing followed
by the more catchy Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend, our story follows a gang
of competing cheerleaders whose sojourn on a wild weekend bus ride replete with
strutting around showing off their boobs to passerby causing a road accident in
one instance is interrupted by a criminal impersonating a cop who “arrests” the
cheerleading squad. From there, they
learn they’re being held for ransom at gunpoint by ex-football player Wayne (co-writer
Jason Williams) whose actions spark a peculiar police force plan involving a
scrappy DJ named Joyful Jerome (Leon Isaac Kennedy). Then the girls are asked to strip at gunpoint
including but not limited to topless catfights, sexual assault at one point and
later one of the film’s female kidnappers draws the assaulted girl into a
torrid lesbian bathtub and suds affair. Only
a matter of time before these half-naked girls gather themselves and start
fighting back though nothing really comes of it in the long run of this
festering regional drive-in grindhouse turd.
Completely obnoxious, chauvinistic, tawdry and possibly even
a little mental, Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend is all over the fucking
map. Ranging between titillating to
leering to oddly cheering on the stripping of the victims, you really don’t
know how you’re supposed to feel about these…shenanigans. Jack Hill’s far more incisive feminist sex
comedy The Swinging Cheerleaders took the bull by the horns and dug its
heels deep into a confrontational topic.
Here, it’s just a rough slog through the comic equivalent of female mud
wrestling. As Paul Ryan’s camera goes
out of the way to ogle naked breasts, one can’t help but think of Tinto Brass’ Cheeky
and its dolly shot across an armada of asses. Then there’s just plainly baffling moments
like a Doberman rolling over on the ground with a poorly superimposed sound
effect of Chewbacca from Star Wars.
When it isn’t cheering on t&a exploitation of nubile cheerleaders,
it spazzes out with weird tonal shifts and scenes that don’t make a whole lot
of sense. The cheap Casio keyboard score
by Ruben Banuelos which, again, seems to egg on the bad behavior, frankly
sounds like Wesley Willis by way of pornography.
Where the film does kinda shine are the performances of the
cast members, some of which include future Meatballs and Tag: The
Assassination Game actress Kristine DeBell and Flesh Gordon star
Jason Williams. With both actors having
dabbled in pornography, the central leads in this story play their parts well
and an odd unlikely kinship starts to form between them here. The film also stars exploitation starlet
Marilyn Joi of Possession of Nurse Sherri who is among the sassiest
characters of this saga feeling plucked right out of a blaxploitation
film. Also caught up in this mess is The
Hills Have Eyes star Robert Houston who since went on to become a renowned filmmaker
and even garnered an Oscar nomination for one of his documentaries. The film keeps cutting back to Leon Isaac
Kennedy as the DJ whose subsequent success in the Penitentiary films
sparked an attempt to cash in on those movies by Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend’s
distributors with middling success.
I won’t lie, this was a rough ride I couldn’t wait to be
done with. While yes it is clearly intended
to be a tawdry romp aimed at regional drive-in filmgoers looking for a make-out
in between a toke while occasionally glancing at the boobs onscreen, seen now its
a septic field. MVD’s port of Code Red’s
frankly rough, scratchy and dark 35mm print transfer looks and sounds pretty
poor but one supposes this is probably how audiences digested this muck. Where the disc shines are the extras also
ported over from the Code Red including a running audio-commentary by director
Jeff Werner, Marilyn Joi and editor Greg McClatchy. There’s also four interviews with actors
Krstine DeBell, Jason Williams, Marilyn Joi and Leon Isaac Kennedy, all of whom
have more than moved on from this. In
the time-honored tradition of MVD Rewind Collection, this comes with a
mini-poster as well as a slipcover with mock-up videostore stickers
affixed. Nice release but unless you’ve fond
memories of this at the drive-in or you have to eat up every Vinegar Syndrome’s
Lost Picture Show offering under the sun, most are inclined to pass on this.
--Andrew Kotwicki
