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The Swinging Cheerleaders Dual Format Blu-ray + DVD

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I saw someone on Letterboxd say that "If Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was about college cheerleading, this would be that movie." What a great way to explain this.

According to co-writer / director Hill, the film had a 12-day shoot, which meant every inch of film shot ended up in the final product. They started work on the script at the end of January 1974 and the movie was in theaters by May (at other times he says February and June, but the idea remains the same). The original title of the script was "Stand Up and Holler" so actresses would not think the film was about cheerleaders. Q&A with Hill, and actors Colleen Camp and Rosanne Katon recorded at the New Beverly Cinema in 2012 But there are bigger problems. All of the adults are betting on the football games, including the dean, the coach and Mary Ann's dad, a local businessman. They're willing to do anything it takes to keep their scam going, too.The girls give decent performances, considering the crap material, most of the male cast members are awful and it just goes no where for a long time. Only real highlight is a confrontation scene with the wife of a teacher who confronts one of the cheerleaders and threaten's to "carve her name into one of the cheerleaders tits so when she flops them out for him he'll know she knows." Or words to that effect. What the movie needs is more outrageousness like this, the plot is too thin to be taken seriously but sort of is and really it just seems like the story is on life support until it can finally quietly die. As far as their acting skills are concerned, they aren't as bad as some reviewers claim. Smith is admittedly not much of an actress, but then with her beauty and sex-appeal she doesn't have to be. To complain about Smith's "poor performance" is to completely miss the point of why she's in the movie. Camp does a solid job considering how utterly idiotic and one-dimensional her character is, so she can hardly be blamed. Katon is reasonable, definitely not awful or anything, and the journalist gal is quite good in fact. There is no reason she shouldn't have had a decent acting career. Whoever tagged this a "comedy" must have merely read the title "Swinging Cheerleaders" and assumed it was one. Yet nothing here whatsoever is funny, not because the alleged jokes allegedly bomb but because there was no INTENT to be funny in the first place. This is a sports drama with a misleading sexploitation title. Tagging movies according to their titles is pretty sloppy, pretty ridiculous. Not only is it not a comedy, SC isn't even "raunchy". There are only two scenes of nudity, both brief, both only topless, which is pretty much the average for the typical late 80s big-studio Hollywood thriller. Whoever refers to this as a "sex comedy" is completely off the mark.

The Swinging Cheerleaders" (1974) is a low-budget examination of the social workings of any American university of the time period, including the good, the bad and the ugly. It only took 12 days to shoot with the script started in late January and the movie released in May(!). Interestingly, it was originally said to be titled "Stand Up and Holler," but changed to the more exploitive title for obvious reasons. Some of the female cast members said they wouldn't have signed on had they known this. After making two blaxploitation pictures, he was offered financing to make a movie with the sole request being that it be titled The Swinging Cheerleaders. So the end result is something that Hill described in an interview included in this as a “Disney sex comedy.” It falls somewhere in the middle in regards to its tone, it is somewhat dark and serious while having some laughs and an all out screwball comedy fight sequence. Katon’s Lisa is having an affair with a professor that is married. She believes that they are in love and that he will end up leaving his wife, constantly questioning whether what they have is real at all. Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith (Andrea) and Colleen Camp (Mary Ann) stand out in the feminine department. Colleen was 20 during shooting and went on to play the squaw playmate in "Apocalypse Now" (1979) and the French maid in "Clue" (1985), not to mention the mother in "Valley Girl" (1983). This is the best movie to see her in her early years since her part is fairly big.A student journalist (Jo Johnston) gets on the cheerleading squad intending to expose female exploitation, but discovers more than she bargained for. On the positive side, the female cast is terrific. All 4 female leads are very pretty, beautiful even (Smith being the hottest). Such a success rate in female casting is unheard of; at the best of times at least one actress is average-looking or worse (even in movies that only go for looks). The best thing about the picture is that it doesn't take itself too seriously. Yes, the subject matter is a tab bit more serious that what you typically get out of an exploitation movie but don't think for a second that there's some sort of message being given off here. Instead we're basically given a low-budget movie that has a silly and somewhat weak story where we see the various cheerleaders involved with a number of men. There's one who has an affair with her teacher. Another is just a flat out bitch who does what she wants. Another is a girl wanting to lose her virginity.

The things that make this quite possibly the best in the cheerleader sub-genre are the decent cast, a strong central female character, and the unique sub-plots for some of the secondary characters. Johnston is excellent in the role of Kate, who is portrayed as the smartest character in this and doesn’t renounce her feminism as she grows to care for the people in this sub-culture.Unfortunately, because even a dumb comedy is preferable to a cheerleader/rugby drama which focuses primarily on some boring gambling plot, this film mostly fails in the plot department. It's a baffling decision by the writer, because nobody who reads "Swinging Cheerleaders" wants a corny "social message" about sports betting. Who cares! It's painfully boring stuff which should be anyway handled by proper dramas, not these kinds of pictures. Strangely enough, when this movie and The Student Body played a Dallas drive-in, Randall Adams and David Harris were in attendance and used the film as an alibi when they were investigated in the murder of Dallas police officer Robert W. Wood. When Adams said that he had to leave as he didn't feel comfortable with the content, it led to his conviction. You can learn more in the documentary The Thin Blue Line. The sub-plots plots further develop a few of the secondary characters and examine some particular aspects of college life that exist. Smith’s character Andrea is going through a situation having to deal with losing her virginity to her football boyfriend, which evolves into a pretty terrible ordeal where she gets sexually assaulted by the hippy Ron and some of his friends. Randall Dale Adams and David Harris saw The Swinging Cheerleaders at a Dallas drive-in theater on November 28, 1976; it was the second of a double feature preceded by The Student Body (1976, directed by Gus Trikonis). Both men mentioned their attendance at the drive-in as part of their alibis while being investigated for the murder of Dallas Police Department Officer Robert W. Wood. In the Errol Morris documentary The Thin Blue Line, Adams claimed that he did not feel comfortable with the film's content, and so he and Harris left before it was finished. A few scenes from The Swinging Cheerleaders are shown in The Thin Blue Line. [6]

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