Cheer Squad Secrets (ROP Productions, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

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

Last night Lifetime ran yet another “new” movie in their “Fear the Cheer” themed series, called Cheer Squad Secrets -- though there’s really only one major titular secret in the cheer squad at Brooksville South Side High School, and that is that the faculty member who’s supposed to be the cheerleading coach, Nina Sednak (Anne Brown), is not only running the squad like a drill sergeant but is slipping her cheerleaders steroids to improve their performance and endurance. The central characters are Scott (Matthew Kevin Anderson) and Kelly (Margaret Anne Florence -- what happened? Were her parents unable to decide on a first name for her, so they gave her three of them?) Regan and their daughter Amelie (Karis Cameron). Amelie is a tall, rather stout young woman who looks so unlike either of her screen parents I was waiting for writer Nick Barzini to drop a line in his script that she was adopted -- during scenes showing the family together Amelie towers over both her folks.

For some reason Barzini never really explains, Amelie is desperate to get on the school’s cheerleading squad and ride with it to a national championship -- in her own high-school days her mom Kelly was a member of a cheerleading squad that actually did win the nationals, and mom still has the ring she won. The film begins with the sudden death of Ethan Walker (Kaden Connors, who’s so much hotter than any other male in the film it’s a real pity to lose him less than half an hour in), who got a bottle of illegal steroids from Amelie’s friend and fellow cheerleader Lisa (Sunny Chen), used it, got a bad case of “‘roid rage” that led him to get into an argument with a fellow driver in a parking lot (this is an affluent enough high school it seems every student there has their own car) and ends up dying of a heart attack in the middle of the parking lot.

Nina, we learn gradually in a series of flashbacks, is driven by a mania that formed when her own career as a would-be national-winning cheerleader was abruptly ended when she got pregnant from the grown-up athletic coach at the school she was having an affair with even though she was underage (and who, we later learn, is still there). She suffered a miscarriage that scarred her insides so badly she could never again have a child of her own -- she gets a nicely smarmy line of dialogue to the effect that because she can’t have kids herself she treats all the members of the cheerleading squad as her daughters, this while she’s not only drilling them like a Devil’s Island commandant but feeding them drugs that are unhinging them. While all this is going on Kelly and her business partner Nat (Laura Mac -- that’s how she’s billed, though her full name is Laura K. MacDonald) are also running a boutique maker of summer clothes and are approaching laid-back venture capitalist Marley Pickett (played by an actor billed as -- I kid you not -- Jesse James) for money to expand.

Nina is so determined to get her cheerleading squad to the nationals that she starts knocking off anyone she thinks is in her way, including her drug dealer (who has figured out who she is and why she wants his stuff, and decides to try to blackmail her into paying more -- big mistake!) and Kelly’s business partner Nat, who catches Nina after she’s broken into Kelly’s home to plant steroids in Amelie’s room and also to steal Kelly’s old cheerleading championship ring. To protect herself further Nina, like the coach in Dying to Be a Cheerleader, is also having an affair with the school principal -- though she keeps him in line by threatening to report him for sexual harassment if he does anything that might get in her way -- so Kelly files what’s essentially a whistleblower complaint with the school superintendent and he suspends Nina from her job as cheerleading coach just before the nationals. Of course Nina determines to go anyway and recruits Amelie, who’s also been suspended, by saying the nationals aren’t a school-sponsored event and thereby it’s O.K. for her to attend them.

The climax is a typical Lifetime confrontation scene in which Nina lures Kelly to the school in the dead of night by stealing Amelie’s phone and sending Kelly a text from it asking her to meet Amelie there -- of course it’s a trap, and director David Langlois shoots it with a quite nice Gothic atmosphere, all shadows and flashes of colored lights that give the hulking mass of the school building a sinister aura. Kelly finds her daughter bound and gagged, and Nina overpowers her and strings her up in a classic bondage pose from the spigot of the school shower -- but Kelly is able to kick Nina (for some reason Nina failed to bind her legs), overpower her, free her daughter and get away -- Nina finally corners them but just then the police arrive (Kelly’s husband Scott -- ya remember Kelly’s husband Scott? -- called them) and take Nina into custody.

Cheer Squad Secrets is a pretty dorky and formulaic Lifetime movie, but it’s redeemed by one performance -- and that’s surprisingly not the actress playing the villain, but the one playing the heroine. Karis Cameron’s performance as Amelie is chillingly effective, dramatizing the plight of this young woman torn between two strong mother figures -- her real mom and Nina -- gradually succumbing to ‘roid rage and so dedicated to her cheerleading and to Nina that she blows off a mother-daughter fundraising event the Regans have been attending every year for quite some time. While I can see Cameron being quite difficult to cast as she grows up -- she’s already unusually large (though well proportioned) for a woman -- here she’s overpowering, dominating every scene she’s in and vividly dramatizing both the character’s inner strength and her vulnerability. It’s quite a performance and it deserved to be showcased in a better movie -- though I also give director Langlois credit for a much stronger command of atmospherics than we usually get in a Lifetime director.