Cheer for Your Life (Almost Never Films, Grey Hour Production Services, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021

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

Last night I watched Lifetime’s latest “premiere” movie, Cheer for Your Life. By now Lifetime’s “Fear the Cheer” series about cheerleaders is getting even more repetitive than their usual fare – there’s always the innocent young girl who decides she wants to be a cheerleader, the sinister coach or cheer captain or someone who wants either to help her or stop her, the mysterious death of a cheerleader or two, and the final confrontation set in as close as the director, writers and cinematographer can get given that the setting will be either the high school the cheerleaders attend or the private home of one of them. Cheer for Your Life (a pretty meaningless title; it suggests a Rite of Spring-style climax in which the innocent heroine is forced literally to keep doing cheer routines until she drops dead, whereupon her sacrifice presumably helps the school’s football team to win the national championship) is actually better than most of them. Directed by Jared Cohn from a script by Lee Gorlitz and David Hickey (according to imdb.com, the two co-wrote the “original” story but Gorlitz did the actual teleplay solo), Cheer for Your Life tells the story of Cindy Braverman (Grace Patterson), a junior at East Ridge High School (the movie was shot in Oklahoma but the location is essentially Anywhere, U.S.A.) who wants to become a cheerleader because her mom Meg (Allison McAtee), who’s been raising her as a single parent (no, we never find out what happened to Cindy’s dad), was one in her own East Ridge days.

Unfortunately for Cindy, in order to join the cheer squad she first has to go through an “Initiation Week” that makes military basic training look like a 1970’s Esalen sensitivity-training workshop by comparison. Under the iron rule of drill sergeant – oops, I mean cheer captain – Fiona Sparks (Anna Belle Bayley), Cindy and the other candidate cheerleaders are forced to practice their routines while being sprayed with water from high-powered hoses, go through an entire school day saying nothing but “Buzz” (the East Ridge athletic mascot is a bee), attend cheer practices at 6 a.m. every day and again st the end of the school day, and most of all they’re sworn to secrecy: like the people who ran Fight Club in the movie of that name, Fiona and her underlings insist that anyone who tells anything about what goes on in cheer initiation will be immediately expelled from the squad. What’s more, the three stars of the football team they’re supposedly training to cheer for, Brent (J. Casey Murphy), heavy-set linebacker Lenny (Derek Kenney) and one other whose name I can’t remember but who’s a long-haired stringbean who doesn’t look like he’d be much use on a football team, join in the taunting and help Fiona and her gang make the plebes’ lives as miserable as possible.

On the first day an aspiring cheerleader named Lisa Kwan (Gabrielle David) bugs out in protest against the absurd rituals, and eventually is found dead when Cindy discovers her body. The next day Miss Parker (Leah N. H. Philpott), a teacher who has threatened to report the cheer squad and have the cheer program canceled if she learns that the aspiring cheerleaders are being humiliatingly hazed, has her car car-jacked by an unknown masked assailant. Later, as part of the humiliation campaign, under the promise of an outing to get ice cream, Fiona and her squad of sadists take the cheer candidates out in the middle of nowhere and force them to walk 20 miles back to town – and if that wasn’t nasty enough, a masked driver in Miss Parker’s stolen car speeds towards them and tries to run them over. Cindy’s mother Meg tries to find out what’s going on and why her daughter is staying up at all hours and coming home very much the worse for wear, but Cindy refuses because she’s sworn to secrecy and also to blind obedience to whatever weird ordeals Fiona’s sick mind can dream up – as well as the assurances of the other senior cheerleaders that they went through all the same rituals the previous year and it toughened them up and gave them team spirit. Meg tries to ground Cindy but she escapes for her next round of humiliation, though she discovers the body of another dead cheerleader who was run over by Miss Parker’s stolen car – and the police (represented by a really hunky plainclothes officer who, along with the townsperson who’s trying to get Meg Braverman to go on a date with him, are the sexiest guys in the movie, way hotter than the few male high-school kids we see) suspect Cindy because she was the one who found both bodies.

Eventually Miss Parker’s stolen car runs down the rather nerdy, bushy-haired boy who’d been trying to date Cindy all movie, only to get the cold shoulder from her because, while she’s interested, she can’t have a normal life during Hell Week, and one of the cheerleader candidates ends up breaking a leg (literally) when Fiona pushes a door open into her face and knocks her down. Through most of the movie I was really impressed by the writing and staging of the initiation scenes – if nothing else, this film has a lot to say about the sheer level of psychological (and sometimes physical) torture high-school students desperate for popularity will put up with just to be admitted to the “in crowd” – and Grace Patterson does an excellent job of portraying Cindy’s grim determination to make it onto the squad despite both the level of humiliation she’s getting from Fiona and the senior-cheer sadists and the reaction of her mother, which is to come down hard on her and threaten to ground her if she doesn’t talk to Mom about what’s going on. (The fact that she’s putting herself through all this at least in part to follow in her mother’s footsteps as an East Ridge cheerleader and thus continue a family tradition only adds to the irony.) But I wondered why writers Goritz and Hickey dragged in a murder plot – except that people getting killed (or almost killed) is part of the Lifetime formula – because it didn’t seem to be adding anything to what could have been a really powerful story about high-school humiliation. In the final scene, held at a party at Fiona’s house at which she will announce which girls she’s picked to join the cheer squad, we find out how the two plot lines were linked.

Fiona and the other senior cheerleaders serve the kids champagne – in flute glasses, by the way, not the usual red Dixie cups out of which underage drinking is usually done in a Lifetime movie – and when Cindy begs off Fiona offers to give her a glass of orange juice instead. Only we see her spike it with something or other, and it turns out to be a date-rape drug (probably Rohypnol). Brent, the captain of the football team and one of the three members of it who have joined Fiona and the senior girls in humiliating and torturing the newbies, drags her up the stairs to a bedroom, where we soon learn that the three guys from the football team are going to gang-rape the cheerleader candidates as the final initiation. Brent (whom I should have suspected because he’s the only one of the three who’s at all attractive) leads Cindy to the room but offers the homely linebacker Lenny first crack at her, saying it’s because Lenny is too unattractive to score a girl on his own so they have to do this for him so he can get laid. Fortunately, the party is raided first by Meg Braverman and then by the police, and in a tag scene there’s an odd stock-footage clip of a real football game (I guess football, unlike basketball, is too expensive a game, what with 22 people instead of 10 and all that elaborate equipment, to stage afresh on a Lifetime budget) at which Meg and her new boyfriend Bill (Randy Wayne), the hot guy who’s been cruising her all movie, are in the audience and Cindy is leading a new, reformed cheer squad that presumably doesn’t put its members through being drugged and gang-raped to be admitted. Cheer For Your Life is literally a hard movie to watch – despite the creaky formulae used by the writers to shoehorn it into the Lifetime mold, the initiation rituals and their gratuitous cruelty really got to me after a while and I kept hoping Cindy would blow the whistle on it to her mom … though given that Brent was the guy who stole Miss Parker’s car and murdered both Lisa and the other girl who was going to spill the secrets of the “initiation,” and he indicated this when he snarled at Cindy, “People who get in my way – GET HURT!” (both she and we initially assume he means while he’s playing football, but later we learn better), and he’s arrested by the police at the end – it’s probably just as well Cindy was too spooked to report a gang for whom the wages of virtue are death.