Plot
A cheerleading
squad head up to a summer camp in order to compete in the district finals
where they soon fall victim one-by-one to a unknown killer.
Review
I thought I'd keep the plot as condensed as
possible since that's
all about there is to this cheap late 80s slasher which is heavy on the
silliness, top-heavy on the nudity, light on gore and puts a terrible strain
on the attention span of anyone watching.
Who would have thought watching a load of hot cheerleaders getting sliced to
bits in a summer camp would be such a chore? To be fair to the makers of the
film, there's little camouflaging what they set out to make which is of the
"boozy college dorm's regular Saturday night entertainment" variety.
Basically a goofy
version of Friday the 13th with cheerleaders, Cheerleader Camp
shows little sign of it's slasher credentials as the first half of the film
borders on being another tacky American teen sex-comedy set in a summer
camp. All of the obligatory clichés are present including the slutty
cheerleaders, the fat 'comic relief' guy, the weird caretaker, the perverted
sheriff, uptight counselors, etc. The characters are the stock variety we've
seen before so many times during the 80s but what really drives the
proverbial nail through the skull with them is how badly acted they all are.
Whether it's intentional or not, some of the actors really grind away at the
audience until you get your watch out and wait for the countdown to their
demise. The script has them all engaging in various sexual shenanigans and hi-jinks
around the camp. It's a frat boy comedy full of juvenile sexual humour where
the biggest 'jokes' come from silly rapping and of course the obligatory
scene in which the fat guy bares his ass. The biggest crime
that Cheerleader Camp commits is that it thinks its funny but it
blatantly isn't. The attempted laughs fall at the first hurdle, the goofy
characters are just irritating and the genuine sense of cheese that the film
tries to convey really comes off harming it more than it should.
You'd have thought
that the film would at least share the wealth with slasher goodies and for
this I'm referring to the gore and nudity. You have to wait some time before
the kills start up in earnest and even then there's not much to savour. The
film is nowhere near as bloody as you'd expect, save for one or two of the
deaths, and although there's a bit of malice involved in some of the kills,
the majority of them are so routine you'll not even bat an eye lid when one
of the cast is killed off. Filled with red herrings from the start, it's a
tad too easy to spot the twist despite the best efforts of the script to
keep you guessing until the very end. There's also a small amount of female
flesh and this cheerleader camp must have the world record for the team with
the biggest breasts in the world. Surely the physics required in sticking to
the energetic cheerleading routines with such, ahem, ample participants, is
a bit ridiculous. But the girls get naked so who cares - certainly not the
guy in casting who decided to cram a load of porn stars and Playboy
centerfolds into the film. Kudos to you, Mr Casting Director. Other casting
comments include the star of the show, Betsy Russell who has gone on to
greater recent fame as 'Mrs Jigsaw' in the Saw films and genre character
actor George 'Buck' Flower as the cranky caretaker who blurts out the single
funniest line of the film whilst watching the cheerleaders practice when he
says "makes your pee-pee harder than a bag of nickel jawbreakers."
Verdict
Cheerleader Camp has some alright
moments from time to time but it's just too daft to be entertaining. Low
budget, low brow and high trash. I guess some people will view it as a "so
bad it's good" slasher but at a time when the slasher was on life support,
even Cheerleader Camp fails to get the pulse going.
