Let banners wave, let flags unfurl, who’s on the scene, it’s
Burl, Burl, Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review another movie for you, just like you
like me to do, I hope! This one is called Satan’s
Cheerleaders, and it was directed by Graydon Clark, the same fellow who brought us Without Warning and other fine classic
films of that ilk! With people like Jack Palance, Martin Landau, Joe Don Baker
and John Carradine appearing in his films, it’s safe to say that Mr. Clark has
casting skills on the level of Fred Olen Ray! Ha ha! He’s got Carradine and
Yvonne De Carlo and John Ireland and Jack Kruschen in this one, so it stacks up
pretty well!
Aside from the cast, there are other qualities which stand
out in this particular movie! When you appreciate genres and microgenres as
purely and specifically as I do, you come to appreciate those films which try
to put a foot in more than one genre at once, and Satan’s Cheerleaders is certainly
one of these films! It starts out very like The Pom Pom Girls or some other 70s cheerleader spectacular, and at about the
halfway mark turns into one of the many satanic movies from that same decade,
like The Devil’s Rain or Race With the Devil or The Brotherhood of Satan!
It’s well balanced in its genre-sharing, but of course it’s
not as good a cheerleader picture as those Crown International movies or the
other similar pictures of the period, and it’s not in the league of those devil
movies I mentioned earlier either! But that’s okay, because it’s a special
thing all its own!
It seems there are a number of cheerleaders at Baker High,
and they’re just as self-centered and mean a bunch as you might ever want to
meet! They're pretty nasty to just about everyone! They have a ditzy spin case of a coach and stay pretty busy entertaining
the members of the football team! They also tease and make fun of their
stammer-prone school janitor, Billy, played by Jack "The War of the Worlds" Kruschen in rhinestone
spangles! Billy is a peeping tom, of course, as all such janitors are, but he’s
also a Satanist associated with Sheriff John Ireland’s coven!
This group is like a country cuzzin coven to the erudite globetrotters
of Rosemary’s Baby, though their
devilish mission is less specific! But when the four cheerleaders and the coach
fall into their hands, it gains a little focus: it’s virgin sacrifice time! Naturally
there’s a snag: these are cheerleaders of the 1970s, so their maidenheads are
decidedly on the ragged side! However there is one lady of unexampled purity in the
group – ha ha, or there would be, if only that darn sheriff weren’t such a loose-trousered
scoundrel! Oh oh, the devil isn't going to like this!
The picture was shot by Dean Cundey, the portly cinematographer of
Halloween, Halloween III and Roller Boogie, but it’s not a particularly good-looking movie! It’s
okay, but it doesn’t demonstrate the usual eye-pleasing sheen of this talented
cameraman! The movie is a bit clunky all around, and suffers also from an
underuse of Carradine, who plays a troubling bum with only two scenes! It was
apparently rated PG, though there’s some nudity and a violent scene in which
Jack Kruschen gets rolled down a hill! And there’s some pretty bad acting from
the cheerleaders, the coach and the football players!
Altogether, given that Satan’s
Cheerleaders doesn’t quite live up to the potential promised by its
exploitation classic title, I’m going to have to give this particular wafer
cake one and a half well-concealed peepholes!
No comments:
Post a Comment