Webcam Cheerleaders (NB Thrilling Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

At 8 p.m. last night I turned on Lifetime for yet another “premiere” in their “Fear the Cheer” series about skullduggery in the world of cheerleading, though this one was better than most. It was called Webcam Cheerleaders and dealt with the fictitious “Vanderton University” and its athletic teams, the Sharks. (Well, at least it’s a better and more fearsome-sounding mascot than “Bees,” the one used on the previous night’s “premiere,” Cheer for Your Life.) It was produced, directed and written by old Lifetime hands – Pierre David and Tom Berry, producers; Curtis Crawford, director; and Andrea Canning, writer – and dealt with a young college student, Maisy (Joelle Farrow – no relation to Mia or Mia’s director father John; according to imdb.com Farrow is her mother’s name and her father has not been identified; she’s Canadian and she was 25 when she made this film, older than the character but not unreasonably so) who’s convinced that her sister Andrea, a Vanderton student (also played, in flashback sequences, by Joelle Farrow) who died the previous summer in a mysterious fall from a balcony that was ruled a suicide, didn’t really kill herself. So she leaves “California University” to transfer to Vanderton (whose location seems difficult to discern – in one scene she and her partner contact a former Vanderton student who lives in Philadelphia and drive out to see her, but then she’s also living at home with her parents, mother Nancy (Krista Bridges) and father Randy (Ash Catherwood).

Randy is an alcoholic who stopped drinking for a while but then started up again after the death of his oldest daughter, and we see him at a club called “The Whiskey Bar” (which made me wonder if they served any other sort of drink). He gets arrested two nights in a row, first for driving under the influence and then for assaulting another bar patron, Brian Killian (Jon Welch), who said insulting things about Randy’s dead daughter Andrea. Just how Brian knew enough about Andrea to insult her and provoke Randy to hit him becomes a key plot point; it turns out he’s working for Vanderton’s athletic director, Rob Thornton (George Thomas). Rob has set up a Web site on which Vanderton cheerleaders undress, perform simulated sex acts on themselves, and can be induced for a fee to meet the horndogs who use the site for what amounts to out-and-out prostitution. Rob has made a lot of money off this side enterprise, and he’s also having an extended affair with the cheer captain, Ella (a nice bad-girl performance by Hannah Galway), who naïvely assumes Rob will divorce his wife and marry her. (We never see Mrs. Thornton, but she’s a powerful off-screen presence – especially in the scene in which she calls Rob while he’s enjoying Ella’s company and summons him because one of their children is sick; Rob leaves to fulfill his family responsibilities and Ella has a jealous hissy-fit.)

Rob’s and Ella’s villainy is established early on, so instead of a mystery about cheerleaders Webcam Cheerleaders becomes a human-trafficking drama – and a quite good one, too. Maisy hooks up – in both senses – with Max Nells (Chris LeBlanc – an ironic name for an African-American, or at least African-Canadian, actor), a barista at the local Starbucks. Max’s sister Kiki (Eve Edwards) was also a Vanderton cheerleader until she dropped out of school and went missing – until Max and Maisy start investigating the Webcam Cheerleaders site and Max recognizes her on it. It turns out Rob Thornton is acting as a classic pimp, running his cheerleaders to turn tricks for money and using Ella as his “madam,” the second-in-command that works with the girls, runs day-to-day operations and keeps them in line. Andrea turned to webcamming when her dad lost his job over his drinking (though he got another one after he at least temporarily sobered up) and stuck her with thousands of dollars in student loan debts she didn’t see any other way to pay. That was Kiki’s problem as well, and when Max and Maisy arrange a meeting with her under the guise of paying her for her services, she’s a hard-bitten whore, either accepting of or resigned to what her life has become. Only Brian has tracked her down and murders Kiki almost as soon as she’s spilled the beans to Maisy and Max. Desperate for a way to link Rob to the crimes despite his high-prestige position and their lack of credibility – Maisy and Max both realize he’s a huge figure in the town Vanderton is located in (wherever it is) and they’re nobody students whose allegations against him won’t be believed (especially after Maisy’s drug-induced flame-out on local TV; Ella slipped something in her water) – Maisy asks her dad for help.

Her dad Randy is an attorney with a big law firm that, among other things, has access to computer networks and databases that will enable them to trace where Rob is stashing his ill-gotten gains and whether he’s paying taxes on them. The answers to those questions are 1) the Cayman Islands; and 2) no, and accordingly Maisy, Max and Maisy’s dad report him to the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS agents in turn alert the local police to Rob’s human-trafficking activities, and four heavy-set white male law enforcement officers from various jurisdictions pull the Law and Order stunt and arrest him at the most embarrassing time and place conceivable – during halftime at Vanderton’s big basketball playoff game. It ends with a tag scene in which Randy goes off for a 90-day rehab session and Max gets welcomed into the family as a potential son-in-law (yet another example of how media depictions of interracial relationships are no longer a big deal). Webcam Cheerleaders doesn’t offer that much in the way of cheesecake for straight male viewers attracted to Lifetime’s “cheerleader” movies with the promise of almost-bare nubile young female flesh – just a couple of dance routines performed by the women playing the cheerleaders – but on its own merits it’s a good, if relatively predictable, human-trafficking thriller, with good suspense direction by Crawford and impressive acting by at least some of the principals: Joelle Farrow is O.K. but a bit bland as Maisy, but Eve Edwards is a powerful sex-driven villainess and Ash Catherwood is quite good in showing the struggles and self-contradictions in his role as Maisy’s alcoholic father. Though I wouldn’t quite award it diamond-in-the-rough status, Webcam Cheerleaders is a powerful melodrama that delivers solid entertainment and was a welcome relief after the plethora of dying-to-be-a-cheerleader movies Lifetime had been showing lately!