Pom Poms and Payback (Johnson Entertainment Group, Shadowboxer Films, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, Lifetime followed up one of their better “Fear the Cheer” movies, Killer Cheer Mom, with one of their worst, Pom Poms and Payback. This film starts with a flashback prologue in which a group of young girls in cheer uniforms taunt a homely girl, Sally Crumb (Taylor Scorse), singing a wretched song about her and ignoring her when she pleads with them to stop. Her younger sister Lila (Eden Harker) looks on with horror as the merciless cheerleader bullies taunt Sally. Then we get a chyron reading “25 Years Later” – we’re used to elaborate and abrupt jumps in chronology, either backwards or forwards (the prologue to Killer Cheer Mom was followed by a chyron reading, “Two Weeks Earlier”), but 25 years is a bit much even for them. Twenty-five years later the cheer squad at Palm Vista High School in the Los Angeles area is being run by an officious coach named Denise Evergreen (Emily Killian) who’s dating the school’s information technology guy, Howard (Clark Moore) – who, like the only other person in the cast who knows anything about computers, is drawn as a nerdy guy with big, thick glasses. (His imdb.com head shot reveals a reasonably attractive man before the makeup and hair people on Pom Poms and Payback “nerdified” him.) This time we’re not kept in much suspense as to who the culprit is, though writers Doug Campbell (who also directed) and Richard Clark take their time in establishing why, or what the connection is between the prologue a quarter-century earlier and the main body of the film.

She singles out the stars of the Palm Vista High cheerleading team, Sharlene (Shaylaren Hilton), Jessie (Le’Priesh Roman), and Annabelle (Jazlyn Nicolette Sward), and pulls pranks on them that cause them to break up with their boyfriends right on the eve of the senior prom. In the case of Jessie – the token Black on the squad (there had to be one) – the prank is that someone hacks into the school computer and alters her grades downward so she doesn’t get into Stanford University, and she immediately suspects her white computer-geek boyfriend (the other guy I was mentioning about who knows about computers and shows off as such by wearing big, thick black-rimmed glasses). Howard was savvy enough that when he altered Jessie’s grades at Coach Evergreen’s behest (she is shown almost literally leading him around by his dick, and indeed the scenes between them come as close as we’re going to get to the soft-core porn that used to be a lot more prevalent on Lifetime movies than it is now) he managed to fake it so it looked like it was coming from the IP address of Jessie’s boyfriend’s computer. Dastardly Denise Evergreen is also able to make it look like Sharlene’s boyfriend was having sex in a restroom with the school’s “fast” girl, Theresa Desmond (Shannon Styles, a talented actress who deserved a better character and more screen time than she got), only Denise had spiked his Gatorade with rohypnol and paid Theresa $300 to date-rape him. (If you think that’s a silly plot twist, there’s worse to come.) The third cheerleader has a 21-year-old out-of-town boyfriend and Denise is able to break them up by making it look like his plane has been delayed so he can’t come out to take her to the prom. At the next cheer practice Denise issues contradictory advice to the girls, first telling them they should accept being hurt and move on, then suggesting in classic nudge-nudge wink-wink fashion that they should pull pranks on their ex-boyfriends to get revenge. They do the latter – and Denise tells them off about it.

It’s not difficult for anyone who’s seen more than about three Lifetime movies to figure out where this is going, but just in case you haven’t already “Denise Evergreen” is really Lila Crumb, whose sister Sarah went to Conestoga High School in Mesa, Arizona, where she was unmercifully teased by the school’s three leading cheerleaders – and the person who teased and bullied her the most was Marcia (Carrie Schroeder), Sharlene’s mother. She swore revenge on Marcia and her entire family, and during the course of the movie she’s able to impersonate Marcia and take out a second mortgage on Marcia’s and Sharlene’s home, then deliberately defaulting on it and leaving them homeless. This movie goes totally over the edge when Sharlene and Jessie decide to break into Howard’s car to steal a flash drive on which, out of sheer force of habit, he’s backed up all the incriminating data exposing just what Denise has lured him to do for her through her sexual wiles, and they get the flash drive but just then Howard returns to his car (a white SUV) and drives off with Sharlene still inside, so she has to remain in the back of Howard’s car and avoid detection while Jessie follows them and the two girls make the discovery that Howard and Denise are lovers. Then Howard has an attack of conscience and, like all those similarly conscience-ridden criminals in 1930’s movies, makes the mistake of telling Denise he’s going to report her instead of just quietly doing so – and Denise grinds up some pills and spikes his ginger ale with them, causing him to pass out in his car. Denise drives the car with him in it to a railroad track, then parks it across the tracks so a train will crash into it, and she also manages to set the car on fire so his body will be burned up and there’ll be no evidence connecting her to any of this. Only Our Heroines have managed to trace Denise’s real identity as Lila Crumb by Jessie stealing her purse during a cheer practice and claiming she had to go to the bathroom. For some strange reason only Doug Campbell and Richard Clark could explain, instead of actually going to the restroom (one would think Jessie would hide out there to look for the incriminating documents they were expecting to find in Denise’s purse even if she didn’t really need to go) she goes through the purse and finds identity cards with “Denise Evergreen” but a knife with the initials “SC” out in the open so Doug Campbell can stage a phony and unbelievable “suspense” scene when Denise is on her way and Jessie just barely misses being caught.

The final scene is just as silly as the rest of it: Sharlene has discovered “Denise”’s true identity and has warned her mom, and mom tries to record a confession by buddying up to Denise and getting her to tell all while her cell-phone recorder is on – only Denise catches her and there are Doug Campbell’s attempts at parallel suspense editing between Denise chasing Marcia across the Palm Vista High campus carrying a baseball bat with which she intends to beat Marcia to death, and Sharlene in a stolen car (from a Black motorist who stopped to help her and Jessie after Jessie crashed their own car because Denise had, you guessed it, cut their brake line and they were driving on a mountain road – shot by cinematographer Thomas L. Callaway with so relentless a camera tilt the mountain roads look like the Indianapolis or Daytona speedways – and he had stopped to help, only Sharlene got in his car and drove off in it because she knew her mom was in mortal danger) is racing back to campus to rescue mom. In a final touch of total absurdity that puts the capstone on a relentlessly silly movie, Sharlene does a series of spectacular cartwheels across the school’s football field and saves her mom’s life by kicking Denise in the head and knocking her out – though Campbell and Callaway don’t let the camera linger long enough to tell whether Denise is merely unconscious or dead. Then there’s a tag scene in which we’re supposed to get all het up over the suspense of who’s going to replace Denise as the cheerleader coach – and [surprise! Not really] it’s Sharlene’s mom Marcia. (Well, she did have relevant experience lo those 25 years ago … ) If Killer Cheer Mom was a workmanlike and genuinely exciting thriller despite the dorky title, Pom Poms and Payback was a dementedly stupid movie that lived down to its, and one gets the impression Campbell and Clark could have done more with the character of a grown woman still traumatized by the suicide of her bullied older sister than they did.