The Great American Girl Robbery (1979)

Boring

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

The highlight of CHEERLEADERS' WILD WEEKEND for me was the hot MILF lesbian school nurse played by buxom blonde Courtney Sands (who is not listed as making any other movies :-( ). Her attempted seduction of one of the rich girls by giving her a bath is HOT. The poor girl is afraid and doesn't want to play... even after the villainess exposes her own monumental rib flaps to her! The interruption by one of the male kidnappers is maddening! One wonders if the older dyke would have been successful.The clincher comes when the cheerleaders revolt and the kidnappers are tied up with the girls' underwear. The lesbian kidnapper has her mouth stuffed with her 'target''s panties (!!) and the girl tells her "that's as close as you'll ever get". (Cheers from the audience!)

Outside of some gratuitous nudity, there is precious little to recommend this. This was made by some of the people involved with FLESH GORDON and ALICE IN WONDERLAND, the two mid 70's porno films. Both were released in a hard version and then re-cut and played for years in toned down R versions. CHEERLEADERS features Kristine Debell ( who played Alice ) and Jason Williams ( who played Flesh, and who co-wrote this disaster ), the only other cast member of note is Marilyn Joi. The movie veers wildly between dumb T & A and a ridiculous kidnapping plot, never finding any stable tone or providing any laughs or thrills. In fact, the plot is so ridiculous it's not even worth touching on. The acting is poor all around and the direction is laughable to non existent. Kristine should be the sole reason to watch this but the film fails miserably on this level as well. While top billed, she's barely in this, has very little to say or do, and never gets naked. A huge let down as Kristine was so beautiful back then. She was involved with producer Osco for several years following ALICE and perhaps that relationship allowed her to participate in a T & A film without showing any skin. She would go from this to MEATBALLS and onto bigger things, but her career never caught fire.

This movie seems to combine the 70's drive-in fascination with the Patty Hearst kidnapping with its fascination for sexy cheerleaders. Three squads of cheerleaders are on their way to a competition and for some reason are sharing a single school bus (even though one is a tough, inner-city squad and another is from an elite private school) when they are all kidnapped and held for ransom by a group of ex-jocks who call themselves the National American Liberation Army. There's the usual sexploitation filler--the captors and the cheerleaders kill time by having a topless beauty contest, lead Kristine DeBell has (offscreen) sex with the good guy kidnapper,and the lone female kidnapper (who is of course a lesbian) seduces one of the other girls in a bathtub. Finally, the three teams ban together to fight back, which mainly involves a long, gratuitous scene where they all strip off their underwear and fashion it into a rope which they use to trip one of the kidnappers. (Someone could have just stuck her foot out, but where's the fun in that?)This movie is surprisingly politically incorrect. The black kidnapper is the bad guy while the handsome white kidnapper turns out to be a sympathetic good guy. Still it's refreshing to actually see a black villain for a change and he's the best actor in the movie next to Kristine DeBell. DeBell, of course, was the talented and appealing actress whose career was ruined when it was found out that she had earlier appeared in a porno movie (strangely, a similar thing happened to untalented boob-job Michelle Bauer, but that didn't stop her from going on to appear in 500 low-budget movies that were even worse than her early porno efforts--go figure). This is neither the best of the cheerleader movies (try "The Swinging Cheerleaders", "The Pom-Pom Girls", or "Satan's Cheerleaders")nor the best of the Patty Hearst/kidnapping movies (try "The Candy Snatchers", "Sweet Sugar" or "Abduction"), but if you like mixing your poisons, by all means, check it out.

We all know how titty-flicks are supposed to be right? Well, Cheerleader's Wild Weekend ignores all predetermined conventions. The girls are ugly. They are kidnapped, yet none are raped. Their are no pillow fights or happy moments of jumping. I'm not sure why they tried so hard on the plot, either.