by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I subjected Charles to two Lifetime movies in a
row, The Secret Lives of Cheerleaders
and The Captive Nanny. Had The
Secret Lives of Cheerleaders been a product
of Ken Sanders and the Johnson Production Group it probably would have been
about high-school cheerleaders raising money for their college funds by turning
tricks with horny middle-aged 1-percent males, but instead this one came from
Hybrid Media and writers Peter Sullivan (who also directed) and Jeffrey Schenck
(Anna White got a third writing credit but was not listed as one of the
producers) and was the first entry in a month-long series Lifetime did called
“Cheer, Rally, Kill!” (One wonders what sort of high school would have
cheerleaders whose big cheer would be “Cheer, Rally, Kill” — one in which
Norman Bates was a taxidermy instructor and at the opening assembly the
scratchy-sounding voice on the P.A. system would introduce “your new principal,
Dr. Lecter.”) The Secret Lives of Cheerleaders takes place at the elite Roosevelt High School
somewhere in California (we’re told that in the dialogue, though the place
looks like any suburban high school in Anywhere, U.S.A. — or Anywhere, Canada,
for that matter, since there’s no indication on the imdb.com page for this film
exactly where it was made) and
instead of the old Lifetime chestnut about nubile young teenage girls whoring
themselves for college money, it’s the old Lifetime chestnut about the Good
Cheerleader and the Bad Cheerleader.
The Good Cheerleader is Ava Dobbs
(Savannah May) — I’m taking an educated guess as to the character’s last name
because the only reference to it is when she’s announced over the school P.A.
in the climactic scene and it could have been “Dodd,” but “Dobbs” is how I
heard it. She fell apart a year and a half previously when her father was
killed in a car accident; Ava responded to this by skipping school a lot,
giving up her dance classes, hanging out with her less savory fellow students,
drinking and taking Adderall. Her mom Candice (Denise Richards, top-billed) has
slapped a 9 p.m. curfew on her and, like a typical Lifetime mother (especially a typical Lifetime single mother), is treating her with all the sensitivity of
a concentration-camp commandant, angrily chewing her out and even installing
motion-sensitive security floodlights around their home, ostensibly to ward off
burglars or other intruders but really to alert her in case her daughter tries to sneak out at night. The Bad
Cheerleader is Katrina Smith (Allie DuBerry), whom we’ve already seen in action
in a prologue in which she and two other cheerleaders don lion masks (the
school’s mascot is a lion and the cheerleaders are called “Lionesses”) and
force another girl to drink vodka straight from a bottle and otherwise harass
and humiliate her. Katrina is the darling of the faculty coach assigned to the
cheerleading squad, Ms. Sinclair (Josie Davis), who lets her get away with
everything because she sees Katrina as the school’s ticket to winning the
statewide cheerleader of the year award, which includes a free-ride scholarship
to the college of your choice and which, needless to say, Ava also wants to
win.
She makes it onto the cheerleading squad through a hot routine she learned
in her dance classes — she says she’s only going out for cheerleading because
Roosevelt doesn’t have a dance program, but she figures the skills are
“transferable” — only she discovers that while Ms. Sinclair supposedly picked
the members of the cheerleading squad, Katrina really calls the shots and subjects her fellow cheerleaders
to “initiations,” of which the first is sneaking into a building after hours
and getting themselves locked into an elevator as smoke starts to billow around
them. The intent, Katrina says via a cell-phone broadcast from a safe distance,
is to prove how resourceful they are under pressure — and when Our Heroine
manages to pick the lock on the elevator door with a bobby pin and lead the
other girls to safety in time, that supposedly proves their worthiness. Ava is
in potential trouble with her mom for having sneaked out of the house after
curfew and not returned until midnight, but mom forebears … for now. Ava also
meets one of the stars of the school football team, Patrick (Gunner Burkhardt,
medium-height, handsome and quite a bit more butch than a lot of the boyfriends who afflict Lifetime movies as
teenage love interests for the teen heroines), they go on a date and they seem
to have a lot in common — especially since Patrick doesn’t want to be a
football player all his life: he has a idea for a computer app that could make
him the next Gates or Zuckerberg and quite naturally he doesn’t want his brains
to get so scrambled by football-caused concussions he can’t think well enough
to develop it — only Katrina screws that up for Ava by blackmailing Shay (Bella
Shepard), the school slut, to go up to Patrick at a party the kids are having
(and where alcohol is being served in what’s become the obligatory red plastic
cups, though Ava has the brains and will power to forebear) and plant a big,
fat kiss on Patrick’s lips so Ava will think Patrick invited Shay’s attentions
and she’ll have a jealous hissy-fit over it and break up with him. Ava won’t
return Patrick’s calls or texts until she overhears two of the other girls on the cheerleading squad in the
school restroom talk about how Katrina put Shay up to kissing Patrick.
Ava also
learns about the next “initiation,” in which the girls are supposed to break
into the school stadium and strip naked, while Katrina not only films this on
her phone but live-streams it to the guys on the football team so they can vote
in an online poll over who’s the sexiest girl on the squad. (This reminded me
inevitably of “Facemash,” the nasty, vicious, sexist prank Mark Zuckerberg and
Eduardo Saverin pulled as Harvard undergraduates on their way to founding
Facebook, in which they put up side-by-side pics of women students and asked
male students to log on and vote online for which was hotter. Zuckerberg’s
original idea for the prank —comparing pics of women students to farm animals —
was even sicker.) Katrina’s strip party “outs” Haley (Ysa Penarejo), who’s been showing up for cheer
practice and games wearing some sort of slimming undergarment, and such is
Katrina’s power that she literally orders Haley off the cheerleading squad.
Then Katrina targets the squad’s one token Black girl, Tiffany (Gracie Marie
Bradley), who used to be a gymnast until her latest “growth spurt” disqualified
her from that sport, for a special hazing: first she gets her drunk by forcing
her to drink the obligatory ultra-cheap vodka from the bottle, then she takes
her to the top of the building where the first “initiation” takes place, then
Katrina announces her intention to make Tiffany walk along the ledge of the
building, not only drunk but also blindfolded. Ava crashes this sick party and
with the help of Patrick, whom she made up with once she overheard two of
Katrina’s other henchwomen in the restroom talk about how Shay couldn’t have
been less interested in Patrick but Katrina got her to kiss him and make it look like they were “together,” agrees to take Tiffany’s
place in the “initiation,” only she loses her balance and Patrick and Tiffany
have to rescue her. F ortunately Patrick has been live-streaming the goings-on
not only to everyone at Roosevelt High School but the police as well, and the
cops show up in time to arrest Katrina and the school’s Black woman principal
fires Ms. Sinclair.
The Secret Lives of Cheerleaders hardly lives up to the sensational promise of the
title — though at least it gives straight guys a reason to watch Lifetime with
the promise of getting to see hot, nubile young girls in skimpy costumes
(though Charles joked that all o
the actors playing high-school students looked considerably older than their
real-life counterparts) — but it’s good clean dirty fun in the best Lifetime
manner, and the one standout performance is by Allie DeBerry as the villainess.
Yes, these perky little psychos have become a Lifetime staple, but DeBerry is
one of the best ones: she throws herself into the part with real energy and a
sense of demented fun, and neither she nor the writers give us any particular
reason so we can identify with her and lament some sad fate that made her what
she is. She’s not a spoiled-rotten one-percenter (some Lifetime movies, notably
Restless Virgins, have actually
done quite explicit class critiques), she’s not a former foster child working
out her traumas: she’s just a bitch who can get away with being a bitch because
she has the adult authority figures “snowed.” (We don’t even meet her parents —
assuming she has any; one expects she just somehow climbed out of some
primordial ooze.) The Secret Lives of Cheerleaders would have been a nice kickoff of the “Cheer, Rally,
Kill!” series if I’d seen it when it first ran instead of having to wait for
what Lifetime called its 30th anniversary weekend marathon, but even
now it was a lot of fun — even though Tilky Jones, whom I’ve lusted after and
drooled over in previous Lifetime movies, was ill-used and largely wasted as a
chemistry teacher Ava, at Katrina’s urging, bats her eyes at and flirts with to
get extra time for an assignment she’s missed.
