by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched
two movies, one on Lifetime and one on DVD. The one on DVD was Dunkirk, which I’ll have to reserve comment on, but the one
before it we watched on Lifetime turned out to be surprisingly good. The omens
weren’t great — the title was Death of a Cheerleader and according to imdb.com it was based on a
real-life case from 1984, in which a high-school girl named Bernadette Protti
murdered classmate Kirsten Costas in Orinda, California, and it had already
been filmed in 1994 with Tori Spelling and Kellie Martin. The promos for the
movie had made it look like a really cheesy piece of exploitation Lifetime had
decided to commission mainly because the word “cheerleader” in a movie title,
with its promise of lots of nubile young female flesh in scanty costume, is one
of the few ways they have of getting straight men to watch their channel. Surprise: Death
of a Cheerleader, directed by Paul Shapiro
from a well-constructed script by Caitlin D. Fryers, turned out to be very,
very good. It took a while for a dramatic design to emerge or for me to figure
out which of the high-school girls were going to be the most significant
members of the dramatis personae,
but eventually I “got” that the central conflict would be over status in the
elite Hollybrook High School’s pecking order — including Ivy League-style
“clubs” like the Sonata Club (which made me wonder if they got together to
listen to extended pieces of classical music for only one or two performers)
and the Bobbettes, and a martinet-style principal who keeps telling the
students that if they succeed at Hollybrook High they’ll succeed in college and
the career world as well, with the unspoken but clear message that the ones
that fall behind in high school will stay behind all their adult lives, too. The principal combatants are
Bridget Moretti (Aubrey Peeples), who’s being raised by a single mother, is
working two jobs (including one as a babysitter) to finance all the
extracurricular activities she wants to get involved in so people going over
college admissions applications will let her in; and Kelly Locke (a marvelously
balanced performance by Sarah Dugdale that avoids making her too much of a
bitch), the product of two 1-percenters who has everything Bridget wants.
Kelly
lets Bridget join the Bobbettes but beats her out of the position on the
cheerleading squad and the job on
the school yearbook Bridget also wanted, and she also schedules the Bobbettes
to go on a ski weekend she knows Bridget either won’t be able to afford at all
or will have to scrounge for — the scene in which Kelly waxes her own skis and
snubs Bridget by telling her skis are so hopelessly ugly and out-of-date
they’re dangerous is one of the best and most insightful moments of the film.
Like Restless Virgins and several
other Lifetime movies, Death of a Cheerleader is surprisingly class-conscious, and there’s a third
girl in the mix, Nina Miller (Morgan Taylor Campbell), who comes to her first
class at Hollybrook with her dark hair long and stringy, looking like she just
stepped off the set of a movie about 1960’s hippies, only she soon cuts it
short and off-center, dyes part of it platinum and looks like she’s about to
audition for a job as lead singer in a punk band. Nina makes it clear from the
get-go, to her mom, her classmates and to us in brief voice-overs that give us at
least some of the information we need to follow the story, that she has
absolutely no use for the upper-class crap Kelly has by birth and family
influence, and Bridget is working so hard for even though the game is stacked
against her. She even calls it “bullshit” in one confrontation with Bridget —
and yes, it was quite shocking to hear so strong a swear word on the soundtrack
of a Lifetime movie instead of having the second syllable audibly blipped. The
more prizes in this stupid game Kelly collects, the more Bridget feels left
out, until one night she lies to Kelly and lures her to her car (actually her
dad’s car, which her mom has been teaching her to drive even though she’s not
quite old enough to be licensed yet), ostensibly just to have it out with her,
though when Kelly realizes that the “party” Bridget had promised her isn’t
going to happen, and threatens to expose Bridget and rat her out to the other
Bobbettes, Bridget loses it, grabs a kitchen knife from inside the car (what
was it doing there if this wasn’t
a premeditated assault?) and stabs her multiple times in a scene whose explicit
gore was as surprising for a Lifetime movie as the sound of the word
“bullshit.”
At first Nina is accused of the murder, partly because she lied to
her mom about what she was doing that night — she told mom she was going to see
the movie Ghostbusters (writer
Fryers kept the 1984 setting of the real-life event instead of trying to move
it up — at least partly, I suspect, because Bridget wouldn’t have been able to
corner Kelly at her her home and kill her after Kelly tries to flee and a
neighbor drives Kelly home in the age of cell phones; today Kelly could have
just called 911 on her phone and the police would have apprehended Bridget
before she could kill Kelly) and she was really going on a date with a young
man from Berkeley. Nina also wrote a death threat to Kelly in her class
notebook after Kelly insulted her, but in the end her alibi — her real one —
checks out and an FBI agent who claims skills as a “profiler” (a hot topic in
the 1980’s before profiling got a bad name when the FBI got the Unabomber and
the Atlanta Olympics bomber totally wrong) ultimately manages to talk Bridget
into confessing. She’s tried and convicted of second-degree murder (not
first-degree because the jury decides it was not premeditated within the
meaning of the law), much to the fury of Kelly’s parents, and she’s sentenced
to nine years in prison, though an end title reveals that the real person was
let out in seven. Death of a Cheerleader, despite its tacky title, is actually an impressive piece of work, one
of the better Lifetime movies in its class consciousness and also in the
multidimensionality of the characters: we hate what Bridget does but at the
same time we understand what drove her to it, and though we don’t want to see
Kelly killed (especially since she does have some genuinely nice qualities along with the bitchery) we do want to see her get some sort of comeuppance for the way she treated Bridget
in particular and anyone in general
who didn’t have money and/or didn’t live up to her “standards.”
