The Wrong Cheer Captain (Hybrid LLC, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night I subjected my husband Charles to yet another Lifetime movie in their “Fear the Cheer” series, The Wrong Cheer Captain, which was about midway in quality between the two they’d shown the night before, Killer Cheer Mom (good despite a typically dorky Lifetime title) and Pom Poms and Payback (so terminally silly it almost seemed like writers Doug Campbell and Richard Clark intended it as a parody of Lifetime films). If the title of The Wrong Cheer Captain didn’t give the whole plot away, the promos Lifetime showed for it did: the title character is an enigmatic young woman named Anna Barton (Sofia Masson) who has just shown up for her senior year at {ine Hills High School and got on the cheerleader squad. She’s obsessed with becoming captain of the squad and is willing literally to murder anyone who’s in her way. Her first pigeon is Emma Rogers (Claire Tablizo), who even though she isn’t as agile in her cheerleading moves as Anna has been part of the community all her life and is known and trusted by the other girls on the squad as well as Coach Johnson (Chelsea Gilson). The girls get to vote on captain, though Coach Johnson makes the final decision – apparently Emma got all the votes except Anna’s and the girls threatened a revolt if she wasn’t chosen. Anna meets Coach Johnson and complains, and the coach tells her, “If it weren’t for Emma, I would have picked you as captain” – thereby unwittingly signing Emma’s death warrant.

Anna duly executes Emma at a party in which the kids are drinking alcohol from beer bottles and the ubiquitous red plastic Dixie cups that have become de rigueur for underage drinking in Lifetime movies (and, according to Charles, drinking in real life as well; though Dixie makes these cups in various colors, and there are other companies like Solo that make them clear, red is by far the best seller). Anna spikes Emma’s cup with an overdose of a steroid, nicknamed “honey,” and she passes out and is dead before anyone even notices her, let alone has a chance to call 911. The coach duly names Anna as replacement captain, much to the disgust of the other squad members in general and our protagonist, Kate Taylor (Alexis Samone), in particular. Director David DeCoteau and writer Adam Rockoff are old Lifetime hands, and the top-billed actor in the movie is Vivica A. Fox – but instead of making her the principal or other authority figure at the school, they make her Kate’s mother, Carol Taylor – and the fact that Carol and Kate are Black itself is a departure from the typical Lifetime formula (a white female lead and a Black actress as her best friend who finds out the villain’s plot but gets killed before she can warn the heroine).

Alas for Kate, Carol is as dominant and controlling as her mother as she’s been in previous movies in which she’s run an entire school, angrily reacting when Kate decides to see Shane (Noah Fearnley), the late Emma’s boyfriend and a guy who perked up Charles’ Lust-O-Meter considerably. The luscious medium shots DeCoteau and his cinematographer give us of Shane topless help (though I found him a bit too twinkie-ish for my taste and thought the other main male in the cast quite a bit hotter – more on him later), though Charles looked up Noah Fearnley’s imdb.com page and noted he has a big tattoo on his left side that reads “Family” in cursive script, which DeCoteau carefully framed his shots of the topless Shane working out to avoid showing. The guy in the movie I thought was hotter was Marc Hermann as Eric Olson, Anna’s calculus teacher, who got on Anna’s bad side when he threatens to fail her in his class and also catches her with a vape pen (Pine Hills High has a “zero tolerance” against any products containing nicotine). So after she’s killed Emma, Anna frames Olson by uploading sexy photos of cheerleaders onto his computer (she does this while he’s undressed and is in his shower, which gives us the chance to see Marc Hermann topless as well – he’s drop-dead gorgeous with an especially nice set of pecs, and as Charles noted, for all Lifetime’s promotion of “cheerleader” in their movies as a way to attract straight guys to watch, there’s considerably more beefcake than cheesecake in this one!) so he’ll be accused of being sexually interested in the kids and get himself busted.

Despite her mom’s implacable opposition, Kate and Shane sneak off together and find Anna’s past: she once attended a school called Lombard High and was a cheerleader there, too, until her principal rival on the cheer squad mysteriously died of an overdose of the same drug that killed Emma. They interview the other dead girl’s mother and find that Anna had a nervous breakdown after the body was discovered and was in a mental institution for a year and a half until she was released, whereupon she enrolled at Pine Hills and decided to take up her cheerleading career where she’d left it off. Ultimately it ends with Anna confronting Kate in the offices of the school’s principal, Simpson (Jackee Harry – yet another heavy-set and formidable Black female authority figure, whom they obviously cast because Vivica A. Fox was playing the heroine’s mother and they wanted another woman of a similar physical “type” to play the principal), with Anna yielding a hypodermic whose contents will apparently be lethal, since she’s threatening to inject Kate with it and thereby kill her. Only They Both Reach for the Syringe (Charles chuckled at this variation on the familiar Chicago gimmick of “they both reached for the gun”!) and ultimately Kate sticks it in Anna’s side, though perhaps since it’s only a skin shot Anna survives and, in the final scene, is once again in a cell in a mental hospital, still plotting how to get out, go back to high school and embrace her destiny to be a cheer captain. (What she was planning to do with the rest of her life after she graduated remains a mystery. So do the whereabouts of her parents: we’re told she has a rich dad who jet-sets around the world as part of his job, but we’re never aware of what happened to Anna’s mom. If Adam Rockoff had had her be a mental patient, both her absence and Anna’s madness would have been better explained.)

The Wrong Cheer Captain was an O.K. Lifetime movie, delivering the goods (and offering a lot more glimpses of scantily clad male flesh than I was expecting) that suffers from one flaw in the casting: both Chelsea Gilson and Marc Hermann look so much younger than you’d expect from school authority figures that when they first appeared I thought they were playing students. (Of course, when I saw Marc Hermann undress for his shower I didn’t mind that at all!) If Killer Cheer Mom was at the high end of quality for a Lifetime movie and Pom Poms and Payback towards the low end, The Wrong Cheer Captain was about in the middle, and though I’ve previously defended Vivica A. Fox against imdb.com viewers who wonder how she gets all these parts (simple: she’s part of the films’ production team!), not only did she have relatively little screen time here, she’s so oppressive and pushy one wonders how Kate grew up relatively sane despite having a concentration-camp commandant for a single mother!