The Swinging Cheerleaders

Year releasted: 1974

by Keith Phipps
April 19th, 2000

A cheaply made T&A movie, or an artifact of the long-lingering hangover that followed the failed idealism of the '60s? No need to argue, The Swinging Cheerleaders is both. Pronouncing her lines extremely precisely, the suspiciously post-collegiate-looking Jo Johnston stars as a campus radical and budding Bob Woodward who goes undercover to infiltrate the Mesa State cheerleading squad in order to blow the lid off the anti-feminist institution. Once inside, however, she quickly finds herself won over by her squadmates, including the virginal Rainbeaux Smith (later the star of such cheersploitation films as Revenge Of The Cheerleaders and The Pom Pom Girls) and future Playmate Of The Month Rosanne Katon. Slowly disabused of her newfangled attitudes after capturing the eye of Mesa State's star quarterback, all seems to go well for Johnston until her past, in the form of ghoulish hippie ex-boyfriend Ian Sander, catches up with her. Not content with merely exposing her as a recovering Leftist, Sander seduces Smith before inviting members of "the family" over for "a nihilistic happening." "We are going to gang-bang a cheerleader," he announces with druggy glee, and so they do (off camera), putting the wheels in motion for a first-class beating at the hands of a football player who reveals his no-quarter attitude by barking, "And don't give me any of that we-shall-overcome routine." Eventually, Johnston is able to pursue her journalistic career, and make the boys' heads turn when leaping through the air, by exposing the "Mesa State Watergate," a gambling scam run by the football coach himself. The film, directed by Jack Hill following a streak of Pam Grier-headed blaxploitation classics (Coffy, Foxy Brown), similarly wants to have it both ways: compassionless conservativism sprinkled with sexual liberation. If the Nixon references aren't enough of a reminder that The Swinging Cheerleaders could only come from 1974, a cameo by a football-helmet-clad streaker ought to be.