Director Jack Hill was one of the most reliable drive-in hitmakers of the 70s because he made movies that delivered all the groceries on a low budget. They were films that moved fast, showed some skin, threw some punches, offered pretty ladies and nasty villains and made icons of its stars. Hill, who studied under Dorothy Arzner in his film school days, was a student of the craft and gave a damn about making a movie that played as well as it paid. He made good on the promise of a sensational poster or title.
He made films like The Swinging Cheerleaders, a zippy excursion into the trials of a pom-pom swinger for a college football team with a crooked coach. In a plot almost certainly inspired by Gloria Steinem’s early 1960s undercover work as a Playboy bunny, a journalism student joins the school cheerleading squad in order to write an article about female exploitation. Interestingly, Hill doesn’t take that lightly. She’s one of the most likable characters in the film. She’s the one who figures out the coach and administrator’s scheme to fix the games so they can cash in gambling against the odds. She’s the one who best tells off all the idiots. She’s the hero of the movie, and she just happens to look pretty good in little denim cut-off short-shorts to boot. Sounds like a perfect drive-in movie heroine, to me. She’s played by sultry brunette Jo Johnston who never appeared in another film. File her next to Kelli Maroney and Joyce Hyser as one of those actresses who totally owned the screen in a major role in a memorable low-budget genre flick or two and then went away. Vanished right through the crack under the door of our dreams.
This is a forward-thinking film, despite the nudity (which is fairly tame). Still, those bores who consider every single movie ever made to be a political statement are gonna be all mixed-up by this one. The smartest character in it is a staunch feminist, but her radical leftist boyfriend is a phony and while the football jocks are a little behind the curve, they’re ultimately good guys who understand right from wrong. Makes sense to me. In the end, I think that Hill was only trying to tell a good story, which sometimes means shirking the conventions (Hill co-wrote the screenplay with David Kidd, both of whom took female pseudonyms—”Jane Witherspoon” and “Betty Conklin”—for their onscreen credit).
Rounding out the terrific cast are Colleen Camp as the Head Bitch of the cheerleading squad, an effervescent Rosanne Katon as the cheerleader who’s having an affair with her professor (whose wife steps out of her own blaxploitation movie happening offscreen to wield a knife and scare the young interloper to death) and Rainbeaux Smith as the angelic virgin still looking for the right guy to pluck her flower.