EDITOR’S NOTE: Cheerleader’s Beach Party was the first movie ever played on USA Up All Night on January 7, 1989. It played five more times after that: April 22 and October 6, 1989; March 16 and 17 and September 15, 1990.

Alex E. Goitein had already made Cherry Hill High for Cannon, but now he had Chuck Vincent writing his script, the man who would one day be able to boast of making Bedroom Eyes, Hot T-Shirts, American Tickler, Bedroom Eyes II, Sensations, Deranged, Young Nurses in Love and so many more movies. In fact, if you watched a lot of USA Up All Night, the chances were quite high that you were watching a Chuck Vincent movie.

Animal House then came out the same year and changed how sex comedies went from dirty little drive-in movies to big business. This film follows a similar story and was also known as California Cheerleaders.

The cheerleaders of Rambling University — Monica (Elizabeth Loredan), Toni (Jamie Jenson), Sissy (Lynn Hastings, also in Cherry Hill High) and Sheryl (Gloria Upson, who was also in…did you guess Cherry Hill High?) — fight to keep their players from going to another college, which means stealing the van of an opposing coach and putting crabs into the jockstraps of his players. They also destroy an old person pool party — or make it so much better — with some pot-laced brownies.

One of the teachers in this movie, Mr. Langley, is played by John Hart. Hart was a war hero who came back to Hollywood as an action film actor — he’s in the Jack Armstrong serial — and he was offered the opportunity to replace Clayton Moore on The Lone Ranger television series. The producers of the show believed that it was the character and not the actor that was the true star and when Moore asked for a better salary, he was let go. The public never accepted Hart as a replacement and by 1954 the producers returned Moore to the role. In his book I Was That Masked Man, Moore claimed that he’d never asked for a raise and had no idea why he was replaced. This was not the last time that producers screwed with Clayton Moore and the public stood up for the man they saw as the true Lone Ranger.

Back to Cheerleader’s Beach Party.

This movie is as 1978 as it gets, filled with disco, a Saturday Night Beaver, Billy Carter references and Fleetwood Mac pillow talk. There are, however, better cheerleader movies and to the point, better Chuck Vincent movies. But hey — if you were a kid and up late, Gilbert would make fun of this movie before and after the commercials, getting your weekend started.

You can watch this on Tubi.