by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime premiere was yet another movie in
their “Cheer, Rally, Kill” series of lubricious movies about cheerleaders (and
I suspect the use of the word “cheerleader” in Lifetime movie titles is an
attempt by this channel and the producing studios they contract with to get
straight guys to watch by offering them sexy young sylph-like girls doing dance
routines and thrusting their asses at the camera). It was called The
Cheerleader Escort, and judging from the
title and the overall concept — female college freshmen (shouldn’t that be
“freshwomen”?) recruited into prostitution with well-to-do alumni to pay their
tuition and other college costs without ending up in hock for life over student
loans — I had assumed it was from Ken Sanders’ operation and would have been
written by J. Bryan Dick and Barbara Kymlicka. Alas, Mr. Dick and Ms.
Cum-Licker weren’t involved in
this one — the film was directed by Alexandre Carrière from a script by Andrea Canning
— though the story adhered closely enough to their formula it might as well
have been. Our central character is Cassie Talbot (Alexandra Beaton), who’s
learned to dance ballet, tap and
jazz at the dance studio owned and run by her mom, Karen Talbot (Cynthia
Preston, top-billed). Alas, mom and dad divorced well before the movie began
and Cassie is dependent on dad’s coming through with alimony and child support
payments to be able to afford to go away to college at Tate Riley University in
Philadelphia (it’s an awkward name for a college and I was probably more
irritated than I should have been that it wasn’t hyphenated). Dad came through
with Cassie’s first-semester tuition but then disappeared, went “off the grid”
and is now two months behind on the regular alimony and child support payments.
Given the family’s last name one might suspect that’s because every month
during the full moon he turns into a werewolf and goes around killing people,
but instead it turns out he’s a compulsive gambler and that’s almost certainly
where the money he’s supposed to be sending to his ex-wife and their kid is
going.
Cassie rooms at Tate Riley with Alyssa (unidentified on imdb.com), an
African-American woman she’s known since they were in grade school together,
and of course we immediately assume she’s being set up for the part of The
Heroine’s Black Best Friend who Stumbles Onto the Villains’ Plot but Gets
Killed for Her Pains (though in fact Alyssa’s blessedly still alive at the end
— does that count as a spoiler?). Alyssa and the school’s head cheerleader,
Gabby Sanders (Joelle Farrow), suggest to Cassie that she try out for the
cheerleading squad — Cassie protests that, though she did some cheerleading in
high school, she’s “a little rusty,” but they insist that with her dance
training she’d be a natural, and she makes the team, replacing one of three
women who aged out and a fourth who was expelled from the squad for mysterious
reasons that only get explained towards the end. At Tate Riley the cheerleaders
are expected not only to do what their name suggests — to lead cheers on the
sidelines of the school’s athletic contests (interestingly, like at least one
other movie in Lifetime’s “Cheer, Rally, Kill” series the game they’re leading
cheers during is basketball; I don’t remember basketball being a sport played
during the fall when people have just returned to — or are starting — school,
but since my own high-school days the sports seasons have so extensively
blended into each other this may be accurate and my knowledge base may be
dated) and do dance routines during halftime — but also entertain the alumni at
private fundraising parties for the school. And, as Gabby quickly explains to
Cassie when Cassie confesses she may have to drop off the cheerleading squad
and take a job to stay in school, they do more than that: the cheerleaders also
function as an “escort” service for the well-to-do alumni who want hot, nubile
young female bodies to fuck and are literally willing to shell out thousands of
dollars for the privilege.
Gabby is being more or less kept as a long-term
mistress by businessman John Tanner (Victor Cornfoot), though of course he can
only see her when his intensely suspicious and jealous wife is out of town.
Cassie attracts the attention of criminal defense attorney Terry Dunes (Damon
Runyan), who unlike most of the alumni “johns” has had the good sense to stay
single so he doesn’t have to worry about a wife getting in the way of his fun
and taking him to the cleaners financially in a divorce action if she catches
him “cheating.” Cassie also has an age-peer boyfriend, Kyle Buchanan (Michael
Conde, a tall, tousled-haired cutie who’s considerably more attractive than a
lot of the nerdy guys who usually cast in these sorts of parts — I remember one
“escort” movie from the Sanders-Dick-Kymlicka factory in which their casting
director screwed up big-time by making the older man who was paying Our Heroine to sleep with her
considerably sexier and more attractive than the age-peer would-be boyfriend
who wanted her for free), who’s her study partner in calculus, but after a
series of quasi-romantic dates she slips into bed with Terry, has a great time
and even thinks it’s true love … until one night she spies a pair of red
panties in his bedroom that aren’t hers and look way too small for him to say, “Oh, you’ve discovered my
secret. I cross-dress.” In a plot gimmick so old it was used in the 1909 play The
Easiest Way by Eugene Waller and David
Belasco, also about a decent girl who gets drawn into a sex-for-money relationship
and then has to face the crisis of conscience (go along with it to get the
money to help her struggling family, or exit and save her reputation at the
cost of leaving both herself and her relatives broke?), Cassie gets mysterious
money transfers from Terry that pay for her second-semester tuition at Tate
Riley and also bail out her mom’s struggling dance studio, making her reluctant
to derail Terry’s gravy train no matter how scummy the relationship seems. Along the way we
learn that the college’s cheerleading coach, Stephanie Dodger (Carolyne
Maraghi, an ice-cold presence much like Alfred Hitchcock’s fabled blonde
heroines), pretends to be independently wealthy but is in fact the
cheerleaders’ madam, setting up their “dates” and living well off their
proceeds.
Stephanie is more than the ring’s madam; she’s also its enforcer:
when Gabby gets pregnant with John Tanner’s child and insists she’s going to
have the baby, hit him up for child support for the next 18 years and blab to
his wife if he tries to stop her, Stephanie breaks into her house (wearing the
archetypal black hoodie it seems all
crooks on Lifetime wear when they break and enter) and kills her by shooting
her up with drugs, since the cover story is going to be that Gabby was a
recovering drug addict who relapsed and O.D.’d. Cassie and her friend Alyssa
(ya remember Alyssa? Actually I
thought the actress playing Alyssa was hotter than any of the ones cast as the
cheerleaders and I wished the writers had put her on the cheerleading squad) decide to investigate and
go on social media to look up Monica Danforth (Julia Knope), who like Cassie
wet to Tate Riley in hopes of becoming a veterinarian, got caught up in the
cheerleaders’ “escort” operation, and dropped out when Stephanie paid her a large
sum of money — enough for her to buy an interest in a horse stable and become
its assistant manager (though about all we see her doing there is raking hay).
Monica tells Cassie and Alyssa all, and Cassie and Alyssa work out a scheme
with Cassie’s friend Kyle (ya remember Kyle?) to expose the ring. At another big alumni event
during which the cheerleaders are set to perform, Cassie and Alyssa corner
Stephanie in the women’s restroom and get her to admit her role in the scheme —
while they’ve got their cell phone on and Kyle commandeers the mike to
broadcast what Stephanie is saying, including the names of some of the johns
(we see a great shot of a woman bolting from John’s table — his wife,
obviously, about to deliver the divorce suit that’s going to break him
financially now that her years-long suspicions have been confirmed), and
Stephanie, who was there to get an award for her years of college
philanthrophy, walks through the room with impeccable sang-froid after she realizes she’s been disgraced.
There’s a
tag scene in which Cassie, Kyle, Cassie’s mom Karen and the accountant she’s
dating — who thinks he can work out her financial problems so she can keep both
the house and her dance studio without her scapegrace ex’s money — all meet for
dinner and Cassie announces that instead of continuing at Tate Riley she’ll get
a job and find a local college she can attend while living at home (though she
promises she’ll still date Kyle). The Cheerleader Escort lives up to the promise of its title — though the
sex scenes are perfunctory and awfully abbreviated (even though writer Canning
wisely moved up the age of the cheerleader escorts from high school to college
to avoid running afoul of all that Thought Police legislation about depicting
adult males having sex with underage partners, she and director Carrière were
obviously too scared of the moral Thought Police to get too engagingly
lubricious in showing what was going on, so we get an awful lot of
Lubitsch-style doors shoved in our faces just as things are starting to get
interesting) — but it’s no more than a typical Lifetime formula movie and
there’s little or no attempt to depict the class-struggle aspects of the plot.
I’d have liked to hear some dialogue warning Cassie and Alyssa, when they
threaten to go to the police, that the police are in the pockets of the
1-percenters who are the cheerleader-escorts’ customers — there are hints of that in Canning’s dialogue but it doesn’t become
a plot point the way the power of the 1 percent (a phrase that’s actually used
in this script) has in Restless Virgins and other more class-conscious Lifetime films. I liked The
Cheerleader Escort but it wasn’t anything
really special.
