Dying to Be a Cheerleader (MarVista Entertainment, Robbins Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

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

Last night Charles and I watched what was advertised as a “new” Lifetime movie (for some reason they’re not using the “Premiere” designation anymore, and given that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic disrupted film and TV production all around the world it’s something of an open question how “new” these movies are even if they’ve never publicly been shown before). The film was part of their “Fear the Cheer” theme weekends about all the skulduggery young high-school girls will commit against each other, each other’s families and the school authorities for the sake of becoming cheerleaders -- though the task of being a cheerleader is quite a bit different from what it was in my own high-school days. Actually, as I recall, in high school and junior college the cheerleaders were divided into “Yell Leaders” and “Song Leaders,” and there were four yell leaders -- two boys and two girls -- and seven song leaders, all girls. The yell leaders did the chants from the sidelines at the big games and the song leaders actually did quasi-dance routines to records (and since I went to a high school with a large proportion of Black students at the height of the soul-music movement in the 1960’s they were doing their routines to the big Motown hits and quite a lot of other genuinely good songs).

This one was released under the risible title Dying to Be a Cheerleader and was originally filmed under the title Killer Cheerleader (and it’s possible the change was because Lifetime had already done a Killer Cheerleader before) and was directed by Tom Shell from a script by David Chester. It’s basically the Lifetime chestnut of the rivalry between the Good Cheerleader and the Bad Cheerleader for dominance of the cheerleading squad (and the modern-day cheerleaders depicted in this and other Lifetime movies in the killer-cheerleader genre are more like the song leaders than the yell leaders of my own long-ago high school days), though writer Chester gave both the rivals (as well as the mother figure -- more on her later) some interesting complexities that made this at least potentially more interesting than the normal run of Lifetime movies. The Good Cheerleader, Darcy Daniels (Dominique Booth), isn’t all that good: both her parents are dead, and though her mom sort-of raised her she was locked into a cycle of alcoholism, drug abuse and petty crime to support her substance habits, with the result that Darcy was constantly moved, could never count on remaining in the same school for more than a month or so, and in a lot of ways became the adult in the relationship, constantly putting her mom to bed after she came home more than the worse for wear after her latest binge. (About the only thing Darcy seems to have escaped is being sexually assaulted herself by one of mom’s boyfriends de jour.)

She’s only in the high-end suburban community because her maternal aunt, Cassandra Tuxford (Ashlynn Yennie, top-billed and pretty sexy herself in the filmy tops and blue jeans she generally dresses in even at work as the community’s most successful realtor), has agreed to be her guardian. She has zero experience as a parent -- she explains that she was so determined to be a business success she didn’t have time to do things like date, much less get married and have kids -- she says she took in Darcy to atone for her guilt at not being able to do anything to save Darcy’s mom. Along the way Darcy picked up a criminal record of her own, mostly for shoplifting but also including two counts of arson -- though she says one was an accident and one was a prank that went badly wrong. The Bad Cheerleader is Taylor Jennings (Kalen Bull, who turns in a finely honed performance and creates a characterization a cut above most of the hot young blondes who play Lifetime’s Perky Psycho Babes), the captain of the Amazons cheerleading squad at the ultra-exclusive suburban high school where all this takes place. She choreographs the dance routines and in the opening sequences is upset at the sloppiness of Tracy Trench (Tristina Lee Bryant), the squad’s one Black member -- though there’s at least a hint that Taylor’s problem with Tracy is simple racism -- and the “problem” solves itself when Tracy gets tripped after leaving a cheerleading practice and breaks her leg. This opens up a slot on the cheerleading squad and the coach, Janice Phillips (Casey O’Keefe), announces open tryouts.

Darcy shows up and -- at least according to what the script tells us (she looked O.K. to me but not as overwhelming as writer Chester said she was) -- aces the tryout, but Taylor blackmails Coach Phillips and tells her that if she puts Darcy on the squad, Taylor will tell her parents -- both of whom are on the school board -- that Phillips is having an affair with the school’s married principal (Jon Bridell) and both principal and coach will be fired. So the hapless coach puts another girl on the squad and Darcy goes back home and nurses her grievances. Darcy got on Taylor’s shit list for allegedly cruising her boyfriend Brandon Hollister (Christian Rivera, who for some reason is given a curly nerd hairdo that makes him look dorky -- his imdb,com head shot actually makes him look considerably sexier than this film does), though all that happened between them was that she dropped her books and Brandon helped her pick them up. Brandon insists that he wanted to break up with Taylor anyway, while Darcy has attracted a much hotter (at least to me!) guy named Warren (alas not listed on imdb,com), but of course Taylor still considers Brandon her property. Midway through the movie another cheerleader, Madison (Grace Patterson), gets cornered in the shower by an unseen assailant -- though she’s not wielding a knife and she isn’t really the school taxidermy teacher in drag, director Shell was obviously inspired by Hitchcock’s Psycho here). She’s shoved against the tile wall of the school shower, dies and isn’t discovered until the school janitor lets himself in to clean up the next morning.

Madison’s death opens up yet another slot on the cheerleading squad, and this time Coach Phillips puts Darcy on the squad and defies Taylor’s blackmail threat -- only at the first practice Taylor and Darcy get into a fight and Coach Phillips kicks them both off the squad. Along about this time Darcy borrows a drone -- I’m not making this up, you know -- her aunt Cassandra uses to monitor local properties she might be able to list and intends to use it to film the cheerleader practices from above so she and the other girls can see how they’re doing (the fact that they could do this almost as well by setting up someone’s video-equipped cell phone to film the routines doesn’t seem to have occurred to writer Chester), only someone steals it from Darcy’s school locker (someone who’s able to pick the lock with a bent paper clip -- for such a high-end high school the security leaves a lot to be desired) and uses it to attack Taylor’s sometime boyfriend Brandon (ya remember Brandon?) while he’s on his electric scooter, breaking his arm. The next thing we know we see Coach Phillips leaving the motel after one of her assignations with the principal -- she justifies continuing the affair by saying the principal has promised to divorce his wife so they can marry, and my husband Charles joked, “Oh, you didn’t believe the old ‘I’m-going-to-divorce-my-wife’ line, did you?”) -- and being caught inside her car by a stalker who strangles her and leaves her dead.

The cops immediately suspect Darcy -- after all, she is the one with the criminal record -- but the writer drops us a big hint when he mentions that Taylor’s best friend April (Nicolette Langley) is on psych meds (we know this because we see texts from April’s parents -- whom we never actually see -- on her phone, “Did you take your meds today?” and we get the obligatory scene in which April not only goes off her meds but sweeps them to the floor of her bedroom with her forearm). It leads to a climax at an old deserted house that used to be in April’s family, in which she kidnaps Darcy, ties her up and spreads gasoline all over the place because she wants it to look like the convicted arsonist Darcy decided to end it all by immolating herself, since she likes fire so much. Only Cassandra catches on to what’s happening -- Darcy had actually planned to leave her aunt’s home, since she’s perfectly capable of fending for herself, but April grabbed her before she could do that -- and she enlists Taylor to help her find her niece, figuring that Taylor would be most likely to know where April would take a person she had kidnapped. Taylor suddenly turns to the side of good as she helps Cassandra find her seemingly errant but actually kidnapped niece, and they trace her to the deserted house (where fortunately there’s still cell-phone service so they can call the police -- usually Lifetime stages their climaxes in out-of-the-way places the villains have selected because there isn’t cell service that far out -- though there were a few touch-and-go moments where Taylor’s GPS faded out and she wasn’t sure she was directing Cassandra correctly).

The finale is a typical Lifetime roundelay in which April turns out to have a gun and a knife, she loses the gun when Taylor conks her on the head with an ornate lamp that appears to be the nearest and most convenient blunt object, ultimately Darcy frees herself from April’s rather crude attempt at bondage and ultimately grabs the gun and shoots April, though not before she gives a tearful confession that she did all of this because she thought Taylor was perfect and she wanted them to be together their whole lives. It’s not every Lifetime movie in which the psycho’s motive is an unrequited Lesbian crush! Dying to Be a Cheerleader is one of Lifetime’s better movies in the killer-cheerleader sub-genre: the acting is quite good all around, with Nicolette Langley especially good in her final scene in which she confesses her love for Taylor and her regret that she’s going to have to kill Taylor, Cassandra and Darcy so no one will find out her secret. (Yeah, right.)

Though one wonders how Dick Wolf’s writers would have done the second part of a Law and Order episode on this plot -- had April survived there would have been innumerable snarls about how to try her (as a juvenile? As an adult? Would her lawyers have been able to get her off on diminished-capacity defense and been able to have her institutionalized instead of sent to prison -- and could have that set up a Dying to Be a Cheerleader II in which she’d have formed a similarly outsized crush on one of her fellow inmates?) -- Dying to Be a Cheerleader, despite a stupid title and some hoary plot devices David Chester should have been ashamed of, is actually a quite good thriller (though Charles was disappointed that Chester revealed the identity of the real criminal too soon and didn’t keep us guessing among his wide array of suspects) despite a confusing flashback scene towards the end that for a moment had me dreading that Chester would pull a last-minute reversal and have Darcy turn out to be the homicidally crazy villainess … it turns out just to be a literal flashback of Darcy returning to the motel where she and her mother were then staying and Darcy discovering mom dead of an O.D. Whew! Scared me there for a moment, David Chester!