The Wrong Cheerleader Coach (Lifetime Pictures, Hybrid, 2020)

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

Last night’s Lifetime movie about cheerleaders was called The Wrong Cheerleader Coach -- though I inevitably joked about extending the title to incorporate more Lifetime formulae and calling it The Wrong Cheerleader Coach She Met Online at 17. It was a quirky sort of follow-up to The Wrong Cheerleader, down to an inventive reworking of the line Vivica A. Fox, who was in both movies (and whom I regard as a sort of successor to Hattie McDaniel, even though she’s playing an authority figure instead of a maid, because she has McDaniel’s old stereotyped role of the sensible Black woman who tries to talk the white characters out of their stupidities), said at the end of the earlier film. The Wrong Cheerleader Coach was produced by Lifetime Pictures (they’ve become, at least on their credits, a producing studio instead of just a cable outlet) in association with the Canadian company Hybrid, and Vivica A. Fox plays the right cheerleader coach, Coach Burke (if she has a first name we never see it, which reminds me of Ralph Berton’s comment that growing up in the 1920’s he wasn’t aware until decades later that teachers even had first names), who has just hired a new assistant coach, Devan Walters (Johanna Liauw), fresh out of junior college.

Devan, of course, turns out to be the wrong cheerleader coach referred to in the title, and what’s “wrong” about her is that ever since her mom left her dad while she was still a child and left her dad to raise her as a single parent, Devan has developed a “thing” for older men, particularly older men who are also raising teenage girls as a single parent. The single dad she goes after in this movie is John Thompson, played by former child actor and teen heartthrob Corin Nemec -- he used to go by “Corky Nemec” until he tweaked the nickname to make it sound more mature as he got older (his birth name was “Joseph Charles Nemec IV”) -- and like some of the other 1980’s heartthrobs Lifetime has dug up lately, including Eric Roberts and Jason Priestley, he’s weathered the years well enough that he’s still credible as a man who can attract a chiclet like Devan. John is an architect who’s just been reassigned from Chicago to wherever (the locale of this movie is unspecified but I was assuming it was a major city in the Pacific Northwest, where a lot of Lifetime movies are set so they can be shot just across the Canadian border in Vancouver) to oversee a major construction project his firm has designed.

This has meant uprooting Hannah Thompson (Madi Burton), his daughter, whom he’s been raising as a single parent since the death of Hannah’s mom from cancer a year before. Hannah is upset that her dad uprooted her from her familiar surroundings and social circle just as she was about to start her senior year in high school and was hoping to be the star of her old school’s cheerleading squad. Now she’s forced to attend Lincoln High School and try out for the “Eagles” cheer team, which intimidates her because of Coach Burke’s fearsome reputation. Hannah isn’t totally the stereotypical “New Girl in School” because she makes friends almost immediately; the Lincoln football team’s quarterback, Ben Fairmont (Duke Van Patten, grandson of Dick Van Patten and son of Vincent Van Patten -- I remember wondering when Vincent first emerged on the scene how someone whose dad always looked to me like someone had baked him out of Wonder Bread could have sired a hunky son, and if anything Duke is even hotter than his dad -- it’s true that he was born in 1993 and therefore is about a decade too old to be playing a high school student in a 2020 movie, but who cares? Frankly, I’d rather watch someone this ripped than the twerpy twink casting directors Dean E. Frank and Donald Paul Pemrick would have picked if they’d been looking for someone more age-appropriate), just happens to be her next-door neighbor and offers her a ride to school her first day.

She also makes a friend on the cheerleading squad, Claire (Mea Wilkerson), who because she’s Black seems like writers Adam Rockoff, Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan (only Rockoff is credited on imdb.com but the others are listed on the film’s credits and they’re the usual team Hybrid goes to for their “original” stories) are setting her up to be the Heroine’s African-American Best Friend Who Catches On to the Villain’s Plot but Gets Killed Before She Can Tell Anyone -- but Lifetime has actually been moving away from that cliche in the last two years or so and Claire is blessedly still alive at the end of the film. The titular wrong cheerleading coach, Devan Walters, immediately sets her sights on Hannah’s dad John once she lays her eyes on him, though she has competition from Melissa Ross (Bailey Kai), an assistant to the construction supervisor on the big project John is supposed to be supervising, whom he meets professionally but starts dating because they share an interest in fine cuisine and Melissa is interested in showing him the best restaurants in a city he doesn’t know.

That doesn’t stop Devan from hanging out outside the Thompsons’ home in the obligatory (for a Lifetime villain of either mainstream gender) dark hoodie and at one point even stalking a restaurant where John and Melissa are having one of their foodie dates -- for a moment I thought Devan was going to ambush Melissa in the women’s rest room and beat the shit out of her, but she didn’t (at least Messrs. Schenck, Sullivan and Rockoff showed that much restraint!). Instead Devan comes over unannounced and uninvited to the Thompsons’ one night and brings a bunch of takeout Chinese food in the obligatory folded cardboard containers --- she says she cooked it all herself, but that’s a little hard to believe -- and John Thompson tells her off and says he’s absolutely not interested in her “that way,” as grateful as he is for the private coaching sessions (which he paid for) Devan gave Hannah as she was auditioning for the cheer squad.

Against his daughter’s protestations, once Devan turns violently against Hannah and chews her out as incompetent in front of the cheer squad and Coach Burke, John goes to Coach Burke and tells her about his situation with Devan. Coach Burke gives Devan a major dressing-down and Devan responds by trying to eliminate the competition, running Melissa down with her car in a big parking lot. Melissa survives but is laid up in the hospital with a broken leg -- and John is solicitous enough he spends all the time he can spare visiting her and helping with her care. Hannah gets a lead on a former junior college cheerleading coach, Coach Hughes (Tara Reid), who remembers Devan as someone who set her sights on another older man who was raising his cheerleader daughter as a single father, only the man died under “mysterious” circumstances.

They’re not so mysterious to us because we’ve already seen Devan commit murder: she worked out at a gym where she had a personal trainer, Jack (Jensen Atwood, a very hot Black actor who was definitely giving Duke Van Patten a run for his money in the looks department -- especially when we saw him shirtless during one of his own workout session and we got a great look at his amazing pecs), who was continually making passes at her. I know whom I would have chosen if the alternatives were Jensen Atwood and the current Corin Nemec, but Devan protests that she’s not interested in anyone so close to her own age and at one point she eliminates him by sneaking up behind him with a dumbbell and hitting him over the head with it. (This is yet another murder in a Lifetime movie which not only never gets solved but seemingly never even gets investigated: one would think Jack’s body would be discovered sometime and the cops would take the call and find out his connection to Devan, but instead he just disappears and nobody seems either to know or care that he’s missing.)

Eventually Hannah is surprised at her home by Devan, who holds a knife to her throat while she’s in Hannah’s house and John is out. Hannah tries to talk Devan into sparing her life by saying she always wanted Devan as a stepmom, and Ben (ya remember Ben? Though he did take Hannah on the trip to see Coach Hughes, for the most part he has far less of an important role in solving the mystery than most Lifetime teen-girl-movie boyfriends) tries to intervene. Devan tells Ben she’s the one with the knife and therefore he has nothing to say about the situation, but just then the deus ex machina arrives in the person of Coach Burke, who knocks out Devan with a hockey stick and says, “I hired the wrong cheerleader coach” -- a clever but predictable variant on her exit line in the previous Lifetime movie The Wrong Cheerleader, “You messed with the wrong cheerleader.”

There’s a bizarre postlude introduced by a title reading, “One Year Later,” only it’s not at all what we expected: instead of Hannah doing cheer as part of her first year in college and John and Melissa happily paired off at long last, apparently they broke up because the new woman in John’s life is Hannah’s new cheerleading coach, and as John thanks her for all the help she’s been to Hannah she makes an enigmatic remark along the lines of, “I don’t think I ever want to leave.” It’s the sort of here-we-go-again open-ended ending Lifetime has been annoying us with lately (though usually it’s one in which the villain has escaped -- as Devan indeed did at the end of this one -- and is seen pulling the same scheme on another unsuspecting victim in another town) instead of the return-to-normalcy ending we were expecting and hoping for.

The Wrong Cheerleader Coach was an O.K. Lifetime movie, competently directed by David DeCoteau (who, like the writers, s a name we’re used to seeing on Lifetime-Hybrid productions) and with yet another good villainess performance by Johanna Lieuw that helps make up for the non-performance by Madi Burton as Hannah, the girl we’re supposed to like. Burton isn’t especially attractive -- I suspect any straight guys in the audience got far more of a “charge” from Johanna Lieuw -- and she barely acts at all; like Jerni Stewart in Cheerleader Abduction, Burton is just a drip, neither competent nor flamboyantly awful but just there, able to do little more than pout in big scenes like the one in which Devan tells Hannah off in cheerleading practice just because Hannah’s dad has rejected her. The two people who’d reviewed this movie so far for imdb.com have both complained about how often Corin Nemec took off his glasses and then put them on again, but I could regard that as the vanity of a middle-aged man whose eyesight has deteriorated enough he needs glasses but his male ego is still resisting them. But The Wrong Cheerleader Coach has more serious problems than the state of Corin Nemec’s eyes!