Rather than being the sexy
romp its marketing materials promise, The
Pom Pom Girls is a boring hodgepodge of clichéd teen-cinema tropes. The
picture throws together cheerleading, dating, drinking, driving, football,
pranks, rebellion, and sex, but fails to generate interest because the
characters are so anonymous and the storyline is so enervated. In fact, one
must exercise tremendous generosity to suggest that The Pom Pom Girls even has
a storyline, since the movie is really just a series of vignettes about
teenagers making mischief. Filmmaker Joseph Ruben, who later scored with
big-budget thrillers including Sleeping
With the Enemy (1991), co-wrote and directed this drive-in dud for the schlock
merchants at Crown International Pictures as one of his first projects. Ruben
assembled a cast of attractive young people, some of whom periodically disrobe,
but The Pom Pom Girls doesn’t even
have the conviction of a proper exploitation movie; in lieu of truly raunchy
scenes, the picture offers such tame distractions as a cafeteria food fight, a
dirt-bike race, and a “chicken run” climax borrowed, shamelessly, from the
adolescent-angst classic Rebel Without a
Cause (1955). The main characters are football star Jesse (Michael Mullins)
and reckless classmate Johnnie (Robert Carradine), along with their
girlfriends, cheerleaders Laurie (Jennifer Ashley) and Sally (Lisa Reeves);
these leading actors give performances running the gamut from barely adequate
to forgettable. The movie tracks the main quartet’s rivalry with students from a
neighboring school, as well as the group’s romantic entanglements. While a
smidgen of dramatic conflict emerges during arguments between Jesse and his
coach (James Gammon), most of the film’s screen time is wasted on trite
situations: patrons at a drive-in restaurant getting impatient because the
carhop is humping a customer in a van, teenagers stealing a fire truck in order
to hose down a rival school’s football team during a practice, and so on. As
for the title’s implication that the movie will focus on cheerleading, Laurie
and Sally don’t actually wield pom-poms until the 50-minute mark.
The Pom Pom Girls: LAME
2 comments:
I thought this movie was incredibly enjoyable. No plot, but very fun. Reminded me of DAZED AND CONFUSED.
You're right. Dazed And Confused was patterned on this film. It might have left this reviewer non-plussed, but it has been influential enough to inspire every set-in-the-seventies teen film since. How could it not when it is soaked in that mid-seventies aesthetic, which also makes it function well as a period piece.
The Pom Pom Girls is about the girls, not their cheerleading. Okay, so a deep and meaningful story with lots of subtext it doesn't have. But it never promised to either. It's a story of high school hijinks, so it should only be judged on that basis, in which case it succeeds. You don't drive a luxury car and complain that it doesn't handle as taut as a sports car.
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