Cheer Camp Killer (Lifetime Films, Hybrid, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “new” Lifetime movie was yet another one in what’s becoming an awfully tired series of films about unscrupulous cheerleaders, which they’re showing under the collective rubric “Fear the Cheer.” (Last year they did a similar series -- with some of the same movies -- as “Cheer, Rally, Kill!”) This one was called Cheer Camp Killer and was produced by Hybrid along with Lifetime -- who named themselves a producing company as well as an outlet channel on the credits -- and it was directed by Randy Carter from a script by Anna White that followed all the predictable formulae of a Lifetime movie, particularly in this weird “Killer Cheerleader” sub-genre. There’s the Good Cheerleader and the Bad Cheerleader, and this time they’re competing to win the championship in the showcase gig at the end of the cheer summer camp at “Pacific University of Southern California” (which, as my husband Charles pointed out, is a mash-up of two real college names, University of the Pacific and University of Southern California).

The Good Cheerleader is Sophie Jacobs (Mariah Robinson), a lithesome medium-height African-American who was an enthusiastic cheerleader until a year before, when her mom suddenly died of a brain aneurysm (which, we learn later, Sophie blames herself for because when Sophie was four her mom injured herself in the head rescuing her from a tree house, and Sophie is convinced the concussion her mom got doing that led directly to her death over a decade later). Now she’s a reluctant participant in cheer camp and she’s only talked into going by her dad because he points out that the prize is a full-ride scholarship to the college of her choice (who knew colleges offered scholarships in cheer?) and that’s the only way she can afford higher education. The Bad Cheerleader is Victoria Richards (Sydney Malakeh), who goes into the cheer camp with one huge advantage already -- her mom, Beth Richards (Andrea Bogart), is one of the three coaches.

Andrea Bogart and Sophie Malakeh look different enough it’s hard to suspend disbelief and accept them as mother and daughter -- Malakeh is olive-skinned and has long raven-black hair, while Bogart is clearly white and blonde -- but there’s an odd antagonism between them that’s the most interesting aspect of White’s script: Victoria is determined to do whatever she has to do to win the competition, and when she has her moments of guilt and doubt her mom is there to pressure her into whatever dastardly schemes are necessary to ensure her success. In the film’s first scene Victoria and a male co-conspirator act to eliminate one potential winner, Lilly Walker (Monica Rose Betz), by spiking her water bottle with a drug “cocktail” containing both a date-rape drug and a steroid. She’s driving her friend Charlotte Brown (Jacqueline Scislowski) home from a cheer practice when she succumbs to the effects of the drug, loses consciousness, crashes their car into a tree, and when the police find her wrecked car and rescue her she tests positive for a performance-enhancing drug and is expelled from the upcoming cheer camp. Charlotte is convinced Lilly was framed and hopes to find out who did it and why when she arrives at the cheer camp and ends up as Sophie’s roommate.

The cheerleaders are divided into the Blue Team and the Red Team,though we are told that the contest winner always comes fron the Red Team. Sophie and Charlotte end up on the Blue Team along with one of the two male cheerleaders at the camp, Jack (Philip McElroy), who’s been a friend of Sophie’s since they were in second grade together but now that they’ve passed puberty wants to be more than a friend -- though she doesn’t see him “that way” until the very end of the movie. There’s another guy at the cheer camp, Andrew (Christian Seavey), who ends up on the Red Team and we get to see very little of him after that. But the hottest guy in the movie is neither Jack (we’re supposed to think he’s irresistible but he’s so white-bread he would be conceivable casting for a biopic of Pat Boone or Mike Pence) nor Andrew but Greg (Andrew Rogers), the camp’s medical director. Given how much of the usual iconography of Lifetime holds that the sexiest man in the movie is also a black-hearted villain, it’s no surprise that Greg turns out to be Victoria’s co-conspirator: it was he who was the guy lurking around in the prologue sequence who spiked Lilly’s water (after using his pharmacological knowledge to concoct the drug “cocktail” in the first place). He’s also having a hot and heavy sexual affair with Victoria, who seems to have enlisted him in her plot by offering him her hot bod, though that doesn’t stop Victoria from offering herself to Jack as well by agreeing to “coach” him privately until he figures out what she’s doing and why.

Midway through the movie Victoria hosts a secret party at one of the dorm rooms at which the underage characters drink alcohol out of the obligatory red plastic Dixie cups (Dixie makes these in other colors but red seems to be the one out of which teenagers drink in Lifetime movies -- though Charles works as a grocery clerk and he tells me red plastic Dixie cups are the ones of choice for similar partiers in real life). Two of the coaches -- a heavy-set Black woman referred to only as “Coach Cooper” and who’s the overall boss of the camp (Kelli Dawn Hancock) and Beth Richards’ red-headed and considerably less crazy colleague, Mary Parker (Jennifer Marshall) -- get wind of this and come to break up the party, but in a scene straight out of a 1920’s or 1930’s movie about Prohibition Jack stumbles onto them, warns the guests and gets everybody to hide the booze. Only one of the partiers, Kara Meyer (Ariel Yasmine), has been partying more heartily than the others and she gets a disciplinary warning.

Later on Victoria tries to get Sophie expelled by befriending her and offering to take her to “a club where they never check I.D.’s,” where she gets Sophie drunk. The two return to cheer camp well after curfew and get caught by a campus security guard (who’s unidentified on imdb.com but he’s enough of a hottie that if we’d seen more of him he might have given Andrew Rogers a run for his money as the sexiest guy in this film), only they weasel out of it by giving the guard false names. Victoria says she’s Kara Walker and Sophie says she’s her roommate Charlotte -- and this gets Kara thrown out of the camp and Victoria off the hook, especially since her mom is on the disciplinary committee and she’s able to talk the other members out of actually calling the security guard to identify the people he detained and see if they were really who they told him they were.

Victoria also alienates Sophie from her Blue Team friends by secretly recording them talking about her and then editing the sound file to make it seem like they were insulting her. Charlotte tries to get her revenge by secretly filming Victoria and Greg having sex and then sending the file to the coaches -- but Victoria, showing a truly Trumpian skill at avoiding being held accountable for her misdeeds, claims that the footage is of Greg raping her, so she gets to stay in camp while he’s fired in disgrace. Before Greg gets fired Victoria uses him in one of her other plots -- she tells Sophie that for their showcase routine she will have to be lifted and be on top of the human pyramid, which Sophie can’t do because she’s been petrified of heights ever since her mom fell and hurt her head rescuing Sophie from a tree house (you remember -- like a 1930’s screenwriter, Anna White knows how to “plant”), and she loses her balance, falls and injures her ankle. Greg tells her she shouldn’t participate for the rest of the camp, but she announces, “I’m going to get a second opinion,” and she must have done so because the next time we see her she’s back on the Blue Team with her friends and seemingly none the worse for wear.

So Victoria decides the only way she can win is to kidnap Sophie, take her to a deserted place, suspend her from a tree in a classic bondage pose and keep her there overnight until the showcase is over. Only, in a bush move that would qualify Victoria for America’s Stupidest Criminals, she neglects either to take or to destroy Sophie’s cell phone, so Sophie’s friends Charlotte and Jack are able to locate and rescue her just in time for the competition, which of course Sophie wins while Victoria is arrested by a police officer (Jackie Meriau, who’s normally a makeup artist and has no other acting credits besides this one) we’ve never heard of who’s figured out Victoria’s whole plot and busted her (though there wasn’t any indication that Victoria’s mom Beth got held to account for her role in the skulduggery). The final scene shows Sophie grateful for winning the contest and melting her heart enough to let Jack give her a surprisingly diffident kiss.

Cheer Camp Killer is about midway on the quality level for the genre -- and Lifetime’s insistence on showing cheerleader movie after cheerleader movie is getting more than a bit wearing (especially seeing so many films cut to a virtually identical cliche pattern makes each new one seem less distinguishable from all the others). Randy Carter’s direction is acceptable and professional, but there’s only one scene -- Sophie’s and Victoria’s drunken walk back to campus -- where he achieves any of the Gothic effects other Lifetime directors have sustained through entire movies. The cast is acceptable, and Sydney Malakeh’s cool villainy is better than that (her only other credit is another Lifetime movie, The Wrong Stepfather, which I seem to have missed, but her combination of smoldering good looks and sinister “cool” would seem to give her a good shot at stardom), but overall Cheer Camp Killer is a pretty ordinary Lifetime production, just another attempt by Lifetime’s management to get straight men to watch their channel by offering them glimpses of scantily clad teenage female flesh. Charles had a hard time with the film because all the cheerleaders looked similarly competent and he had to take it on faith which ones screenwriter White told us were the best -- though I did think Mariah Robinson looked at least a bit better than the others -- and I did like the fact that the film showed Black Mariah Robinson and white Philip McElroy headed for a romance (and a sexual relationship) at the end without making any kind of an issue about it!