EDITOR’S NOTE: Cheerleader’s Wild Weekend was on USA Up All Night on August 1, 1992; January 8 and August 28, 1993 and February 25, 1994.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mike Justice is the only illegitimate offspring born of a short-lived union between a frustrated English horror movie star and an American film festival groupie. His legacy, therefore, is to obsessively pursue a litany of ill-defined ambitions in the industry (editor, director, actor) while also falling hard and fast for anything with an accent and/or mutton chops. Fortunately, he’s pretty good at distilling his various fizzles, faux pas, and let-downs into uproariously absurd, snarky tales filled with wit, wisdom, and (sometimes) redemption. You can follow Mike on Facebook. 

Something traumatic happened the summer between seventh and eighth grade: the USA Network canceled Commander USA’s Groovie Movies, my favorite Saturday afternoon monster-movie showcase. There was to be no more Video Vault, no more wacky characters, no more Commander USA, himself—soaring superhero and retired Legion of Decency officer—to introduce me to enduring classics like Mausoleum and House of Psychotic Women. He didn’t even get a proper sendoff—he just walked out the door one day and never came back—like Richie Cunningham’s older brother, or my dad that time he left to buy stamps. It took weeks of crestfallen Saturdays to ultimately accept that I’d been ghosted by the Commander.

Naturally, I turned to delinquency; in this case, that meant immediately taking up with a rebound show: USA’s newly launched, more “mature” late-night B-movie series, USA Up All Night. I’d been collecting Elvira’s Thriller Video cassettes for years, and I was already an avid viewer of Saturday Nightmares—so staying up late past The Hitchhiker and Alfred Hitchcock Presents to watch racy comedians host heavily censored sex comedies felt like the next natural step to adulthood. And what an adulthood it promised to be.

USA Up All Night hit at precisely the right age when I was too young to drive, but too jaded for the TGIF lineup, and just beginning to fantasize about what being an independent adult with my own apartment, car, job, and (gasp) love life would be like. If Commander USA had been a weekend Fred Rogers with a fondness for Filipino creature features, then Rhonda Shear, Gilbert Gottfried and company were a cocktail party at the grown-ups table with foot-fetish gags and Vice Academy playing in the background. Every weekend, that VERY 90’s show opener beamed me from my lonely house in the sticks to somewhere infinitely cooler. It all felt so urban (and urbane), like the opening credits to Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, or that Michelob ad with Steve Winwood. I was sure my upcoming adult life was to be a hazy blur of neon, sax solos, palm trees, and guitar riffs. In fact, this whole USA Network era had me thinking I’d most likely grow up to live in a black lacquer-furnished condo with a skyline view, work some ill-defined but highly successful job in some posh office where I’d sport pastel neckties and flirt with my boss, and in my free time I’d call a LOT of chat lines and hang out in night clubs with Sally Kirkland or grocery stores with Linnea Quigley. (The fact that my life really did turn out something like this might possibly be USA’s fault, but I digress).

I devoured the good (Young Frankenstein, Eating Raoul, Fast Times at Ridgemont High), the not-so-good (Hot Chili, Meatballs 3, Hot Times at Montclair High) and everything in between (H.O.T.S., Summer School Teachers, Troma, Cannon, Chuck Vincent, Andy Sidaris, David DeCocteau, New World). One of my favorites was Cheerleaders Wild Weekend (1979) AKA The Great American Girl Robbery. It opens with a Vestron Video logo followed by the Dimension Pictures emblem, so you know it’s class. It was also the producing debut of Chuck Russell (yes, THE Chuck Russell) working with Bill Osco (that dude who was married to Jackie Kong and made Flesh Gordon and Alice in Wonderland: an X-Rated Musical Fantasy). Along for the ride are Osco alums Kristine DeBell (Meatballs) and Jason Williams (Flesh Gordon, himself). Leon Isaac Kennedy (Penitentiary), the exquisite Marilyn Joi (The Kentucky Fried Movie), and The Hills Have Eyes’ own Robert Houston round out the cast—along with a bunch of other actresses any fan of 1970’s T&A will recognize. Speaking of The Hills Have Eyes the movie also boasts a cute actress named Janet Blythe for whom this was her sole credit (subsequently run out of Hollywood by Janus Blythe, no doubt).

The plot is simple: three rival squads of catty, twenty-something “high school” cheerleaders headed for the California state tournament are abducted off a school bus by a small coalition of ex-football players and one random lesbian calling themselves the National American Army of Freedom. The girls are corralled into a cabin in the woods where they’re forced to sit on pillows and bicker amongst themselves. Eventually, the kidnappers get too rapey, so the cheerleaders put their differences aside to mount a daring escape using quaaludes, their panties, and a cigarette lighter. Meanwhile, Flesh Gordon and Bobby from The Hills Have Eyes are off collecting a ransom for the girls in a fun sequence that’s a lot more entertaining and expertly directed than it has any right to be.

Cheerleaders Wild Weekend is a little darker than advertised (not to the extent that, say, Malibu High was, but it does feel like the most Crown International-y non-Crown International film ever). Sold as a hot-and-heavy summertime make-out comedy, it’s really more of a kidnapping adventure/heist thriller with bouts of slapstick, peek-a-boo nudity, and girl fights shoehorned in. As far as summer feels go, it’s more The Final Terror than Little Darlings. Only in the 1970s would producers think it’s cute to slap together a sexy farce based loosely on the Chowchilla School Bus Kidnapping where teenage hostages stage a striptease contest to kill time (it WAS the decade when Benji the dog’s girlfriend got kicked, after all).