by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched yet
another Lifetime movie about cheerleaders, The Wrong Cheerleader, at 8 p.m. last night. This is part of their
current series of cheerleader-themed movies in what they’re calling their
“Cheer, Rally, Kill” event, and this film, directed by old Lifetime hand David
DeCoteau from a script by Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan, is somewhat
misnomered because it’s not about a cheerleader who seems nice at first but
goes off the rails and turns out to be a psycho, which is what one would expect
given what the word “Wrong” usually means in a Lifetime title. Instead, it’s
actually a surprisingly well-done story about an otherwise intelligent and
sensible woman who drifts into a relationship with an abusive man and then finds
her life and her sanity in peril as she tries to get out of it — not exactly
the freshest of storylines these days but one that happens often enough in real
life it remains valid, dramatic storytelling (unfortunately). The otherwise
intelligent and sensible woman is high-school senior Becky Snider (Cristine
Prosperi), who for her previous three high-school years has been so focused on
academics and keeping an impressive GPA for college applications she hasn’t
been able to have any fun. Over the summer she’s decided to remedy that; on the
urging of her friend Jen (Kalen Bull) she decides to try out for the school’s
cheerleading squad, coached by a formidable African-American woman named Flynn
— we never learn her first name but she’s played by Vivica A. Fox, who’s made a
specialty of playing these tough but sympathetic Black authority figures who
sort out all the white people’s problems for them.
Jen also decides to set up a
double date with herself, Becky, Jen’s football-player boyfriend Chris (Shayne Davis)
and the darkly handsome Rob Brous (David Meza), who’s just transferred from a
private school where he played football and dated a cheerleader. Only, as we
learned from a prologue, he did more than date her: he got fiercely possessive
of her and, when she broke up with him, he started stalking her, lurking around
her in a black hoodie and ultimately breaking into her home when her parents
were away, finding her hiding from him in terror under her bed and … a polite
dissolve spares us the gory details but we assume she’s dead until she turns up
two-thirds of the way through the movie, only to disappear again. Becky thinks
it’s wonderful that a boy is finally showing interest in her after all those years when the opposite sex
pretty much ignored her — which was just fine by her overprotective mother
Eliza (Lesli Kay), who’s pushed her into concentrating on academics and didn’t
like the idea of her daughter being a cheerleader because she thought that
would look too frivolous on a college application and it would also take away
from her studies. Only she gets another look at Rob when he tears into one of
the school’s football players for allegedly looking up Becky’s skirt to catch a
glimpse of her ass; Rob threatens the guy, the football coach breaks them up and
a humiliated Rob decides not to try out for his new school’s football team
after all even though he was supposedly a star linebacker at his old one. Rob’s
possessiveness and penchant for violence gets more and more annoying and
obvious — he stages a scene at the local hang-out for the high school kids, an
all-ages restaurant whose neon sign advertises “PIZZA
GELATO” — earlier Becky had told her mom she was O.K. with eating cold pizza
but we didn’t realize she liked it that cold — and gets thrown out.
Jen, concerned about her friend’s welfare,
researches Rob online and finds the name of his previous girlfriend, Amanda
White (Alexandra Scott), who it turns out is alive and working as a barista at
a local coffeehouse. Meanwhile Rob, in one of his tearful confessions to Becky,
tells her that as a kid he drank and became such a problem alcoholic he had to
go to rehab, but he’s been sober for years — and when Becky relays this to her
mom, mom tells her that her dad was an alcoholic who died in a car accident (that
part Becky already knew) because his blood alcohol content was three times the
legal limit (that part she didn’t). Eventually Rob slaps Becky across the face
in front of the other cheerleaders and the football team, Becky finally has enough good sense to tell him to get lost, and
Rob plots his revenge: he impersonates a school administrator, calls Becky’s
mom to come to Becky’s school (why mom doesn’t take the basic precaution of
calling the school back to see whether the call was bona fide is a mystery), then when she shows up overpowers
her, knocks her out with a drug-soaked rag, and threatens to kill Becky’s mom
unless Becky comes back to him. Becky pretends to go along but grabs a can of
chemical Mace and sprays Rob with it; Rob tries to get away, but Coach Flynn
shows up like the Seventh Cavalry with her own can of Mace (does she keep them on hand in case
she has to incapacitate a bad boy who’s threatening one of her cheerleaders?)
and finishes the job so the police, whom she’s already called (like a typical
Vivica A. Fox character, she seems to have been the only person with the
presence of mind to call 911 — though earlier Becky and her mom had had a
Kafkaesque encounter with two police detectives, who told them there was little
or nothing the cops could do) and who arrest Rob for the (presumed) murder of
Amanda White, whose disappearance after she briefed Becky and Jen about her
past with Rob (with Rob in that black hoodie looking on and lurking!) got
reported in the media and convinced Becky, Jen and everyone else involved that
Rob wasn’t just an abusively
overprotective boyfriend but a killer.
Though the title isn’t explained until
the end — as Rob is being taken into custody both Becky and Coach Flynn tell
him, “You messed with the wrong cheerleader” — The Wrong Cheerleader is actually a quite well done abusive-relationship
story, showing both Rob’s superficial charm and his dangerous nature, and also
being fair in its treatment of Becky, letting us know why she stays with this guy long after everyone else
who cares about her (mom, Jen, Coach Flynn and even her fellow students who
watch his interactions with people and realize something is “wrong” about him)
has tried to warn her off him. It also has some interesting scenes between Rob
and his father (Steve Richard Harris), who’s a pretty nasty piece of work
himself; though we never see him interact with any other characters besides
Rob, we get the impression from his overall twitchiness and ill temper that he
did a lot to make Rob the way he is.
(Also, casting directors Dean E. Fronk and Donald Paul Pemrick deserve kudos
for casting actors as father and son who look like each other we can believe
they’re the biological kin the script tells us they are.) Though The Wrong
Cheerleader doesn’t really break any
new ground in the depiction of abusive relationships on screen, it’s quite well
done and benefits from a really fine performance by David Meza as Rob.
According to his imdb.com page, his original family name was “Baracskai” and
his dad was an immigrant from Hungary who fled the Communist repression of a
pro-democracy revolution in 1956. That would make David a very late-in-life baby, but it’s cited on his imdb.com
page to say that he learned from his (real) dad a determination never to let
anything stand in the way of fulfilling his dreams. He comes off like the early
James Dean in some of those live TV shows in the TCM boxed set in which he was
cast as a psycho teenager, but not without a “sensitive” side (before the Dean
character got softened and was still alienated, but not psychotic, as he was in
his three starring films); like Dean, Meza is a powerful physical presence, and
after all the nice-looking but rather dull twinks playing high-school boys in Identity
Theft of a Cheerleader it was
nice (at least for this old Gay man’s fantasies) to see a film where the young
guys were genuinely muscular and appealingly butch!
