Delinquent School Girls (1975)

AKA Carnal Madness
AKA Bad Girls
Directed by Greg Corarito
Starring Colleen Brennan, Buck Flower, Michael Pataki
Rated R
USA

"I've never made it with a chick in a trance before."

One of the more bizarre drive-in also-rans of the 70's - and that's saying a mouthful - Delinquent School Girls is a weird and grimy bit of rough-stuff, padded with enough absurd humor and campy performances to squeak by as a black comedy, if you're drunk or jaundiced enough to shrug off multiple rape sequences. If not, well, you're in for a queasy ride.

Director Corarito was no stranger to softcore scuzz. His previous credits include the eyeball-scorching Wanda, the Sadistic Hypnotist (1969) and the 'dirty western' Hard on the Trail (1971). Odds are, he shot more than a few hardcore loops on the side, as well. Certainly that dank, just-get-'em-out 70's porno vibe permeates School Girls through and through, from the dead-eyed performances of the little lost girls to the he-man, always-on gusto of stuntman-turned-thespian Bob Minor as the resident bone-daddy. It's all there, the violence, the lust, the drugs, the bad wigs, the kung fu girls and the mincing queen, a toxic cocktail of vice and tender flesh served up as good ol' balls-out American Bad Fun. But, much like Satan's Cheerleaders, Delinquent School Girls is actually two films at once. Its first half-hour is standard teensploitation, the tawdry tale of bad girls on a bum trip, complete with tits-out jumping jacks and behind-the-bleachers dope smoking. And then the mental patients show up, and it turns into a different sort of movie altogether.

So, the story. The film opens with a jarring electro-shock scene, clearly influenced by Cuckoo's Nest, right down to the faking-it aftermath. And then, somehow or another, three dangerous felons from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane bust out of their confines in the dead of night, heading for god-knows-what.

Cut to: The Oxford Corrective School for Young Women. It's the last day of classes before a vacation break, and all the girls are due to catch a bus ride out of town. All, that is, except for a handful of incorrigibles, bad-to-the-bone girls forced to stay on campus and think about what horrible things they've done. This motley crew includes, but is not limited to:

Stoner chick Madeline (Betty Johnson)

Feisty Carla (Big Tit model Roberta Pedon, RIP)

Penny, the always-horny one (Brenda Miller)

Feminist fist-fighter Greta ( porn starlet Colleen Brennan)

Innocent, wide-eyed Betsy (Jane Steele)

Sandy, the studious one (Kay Lange)

Alice, the stoner chick with the broken leg (Valerie Anderson)

And various other girls, including one gorgeous teacher's assistant, Miss Crowley (Zoe Grant).

If this seems like an awful lot of characters to keep up with, well, it is, especially when the film randomly adds and subtracts girls as it rolls along. Anyway, after a laborious lecture from the absurdly uptight headmaster Dr. Baxter ( prolific X actor John Alderman, one of Gary Graver's main-men), the girls in question are let loose. Greta, clearly the leader of the gang, wants to teach that mean old Baxter a lesson, so she instructs all the girls not to wear bras to gym class.

"We'll show that chauvinist pig!" she says.
And then there's a braless jumping jacks scene.
So that was pretty good.
Later on, the girls lounge around in their dorm. Penny sniffs glue in her underwear and talks about sex-with-boys, saying stuff like, "A little stretching never hurt a girl." I like the cut of her jib.

Cut to: Ramshackle farm house. Ellie (Julie Gant) is booze-chugging harlot married to hard-working farmer Earl (Buck Flower). Playing completely against type (and against his own life-gulping personality), Buck's Earl is a sober man with intimacy issues: he is terrified of fucking his insatiably horny young wife. She berates him and then heads off to the bedroom, where she pulls out a vibrator and gets to work. Defeated and demoralized, Earl falls into fitful sleep in his rocking chair.

Cut to: Classroom. Betsy has an odd infatuation with the stuffy, 50-year old science teacher Mr. Miller (Ralph Campbell). "He reminds me of my uncle," she tells the other girls. After class, Mr. Miller asks her to help him bring some books home. She happily obliges, but once he gets her there, he doses her iced tea and hypnotizes her with a stuffed eagle.

"It's terribly warm in here, Betsy," he says, once she falls into a trance.
"Why don't we remove some of those clothes?"
He starts stripping her down, telling her how she will not remember a thing when she wakes.
"You must remember," he intones, "to forget."

Meanwhile, there's an all points bulletin out for three escaped mental patients:
Carl Clooney (Michael Pataki), the ringleader of the gang, a failed "mimic and impersonator" turned felon, Richard "Big Dick" Peters (Bob Minor), a serial rapist, and Bruce Wilson (Stephen Stucker) a "known homosexual". With the cops hot on their trail, the loony trio bust into Earl's house while he snoozes. Earl attempts to brawl with the villainous trio, but is quickly subdued. Dick, naturally, has his way with Ellie ("This is positively indecent!" she squeals, half-protesting), while Carl and Bruce swill bourbon and play the piano.

They force Earl to drink too, so he eventually gets too drunk to care about rape and home invasion, and just settles in on the couch with Carl, lamenting how fucked up the world has gotten. Earl asks the fellas if they'll lock him in a closet, so he can at least look like he struggled a bit. They grant him his wish. Then they steal his truck, and take off into the night.

Meanwhile, back at Girl School, everyone has left for the vacation break except for our resident bad-girls, who sit around doing sexy stuff: a little lesbian petting here, some topless push-ups, some suggestive Popsicle sucking. Just your average hot-bad girl's night in, really. That is, until the unholy three run out of gas just outside of the school. Hungry and exhausted (although I'm not sure why; they just left Earl's house ten minutes ago), they sneak into the school's back door.

The fellas find themselves in the school's kitchen, so they gorge on watermelon and baloney sandwiches. Fearing that the joint may actually be some sort of prison, they decide to bail as soon as they're done eating, but a couple of the girls walk in on them and start beating their brains in with rolling pins. The tables quickly turn, however, and the girls get raped. The actresses actually look freaked out by the scene. It sorta sucks all the fun out of the room. Miraculously though, once the forced sexin' is over, they all sit down to sip wine and goof around together. So, they're charming rapists, I guess. Wine tasting party over, Carl shoves the girls into a freezer for safe keeping.

Across campus, Betsy is visiting Mr. Miller again. She's dropped by to see his new collection of snakes. Non-poisonous snakes that look deceptively like rattlers. Betsy still doesn't suspect that she's become an unwilling sex slave. Before you know it, she's staring at that fuckin' eagle again, and crazy ol' Miller has her stripped down. Worse still, he's letting the snakes loose in her panties. What the fuck?

The marauders break in. Initially they plan on the usual rape and robbery, but the snakes freak them out, so they bail, while Miller has a heart attack on the floor. Betsy, however, is still oblivious to it all. Next, the boys bust into the gymnasium, where Alice and Madeline are getting stoned by the pool. The girls offer to smoke the strangers up, and the next thing you know, they're giggling and making out. But then Carl sticks the edge of a knife under Alice's chin. Naturally she freaks out, and kicks his ass into the pool. Dick jumps into save him and the girls attempt to escape, but get nabbed by Bruce. Then they disappear. Continuity is not this film's strong suit.

At some point later, two of the girls (Who knows which ones? At this point, it all becomes a blur of big tits and karate chops) run into Dick, who they attempt to kill by kicking him to death. Carl and Bruce intervene and make them wrestle in the dirt. It starts to become clear that Delinquent School Girls is less a narrative exploitation film than it is a series of sequences geared towards specific fetishes. Like girls in schoolgirl outfits? We got 'em. Big tits? Check. Rape fantasies, lesbians, girl-on-girl wrestling, even bestiality? Step right in, we have room for every fucking weirdo in here.

The guys find a car with the keys still in it, but before they can get the hell out of there, Dick manages to peep into yet another window to find all the girls not locked in freezers or left half-naked in the mud in the gym, practicing Karate. For whatever reason (because they are all crazy, I suppose), Carl decides they ought to bust in on them and, I swear, make them dance in a chorus line. Bottomless, no less.
"I'm not taking my panties off for you or any man," growls Greta, which is sort of ironic, seeing that Brennan was a porn star.

Meanwhile Carla, bloodied and muddied, finally makes it to the highway, where she flags down a car. Two hippies pick her up, but instead of offering help, they try to ply her with booze and squeeze her enormous tits.
"Oh, we'll help you," says the driver, "but first, let's clean off some of that mud and see what we've got to work with."

Mr. Baxter is still sitting in his office, reading bondage comics (!), oblivious to the horrors going on in the gym. A knock-down, drag-out fight between the feminist Kung Fu girls and the already beaten-to-shit bad guys ensue. You can probably figure out the rest.

Given its lurid title, Delinquent School Girls would've scored in mid 70's drive-ins and grindhouses regardless of its actual contents. I couldn't help myself either. The actual film is largely indefensible, though. It really is just a series of R-rated fetish loops lashed together with a bunch of standard exploitation tropes to flesh it out. Pataki, Minor, and Stucker literally attack their roles, to various levels of effectiveness. Minor's Big Dick is a half-retarded sex beast, a bizarre, muscle-bound cross between a blaxploitation superdude and a horny werewolf. Stucker does a full-on Paul Lynde, and Pataki laces his jokey exposition with lame-duck impressions (Nixon, Clark Gable, Cagney). Too cartoon-y to be authentically menacing, they instead come off as just really, really annoying. The girls are much more interesting to watch, with performances that range from convincingly bad ass (Brennan) to immaculately stoned (Anderson). Had Corarito made an entire film about the girls, this could have been a teen-trash classic, ala Trip with the Teacher or The Cheerleaders, but the shoe-horned fetish elements and these braying jackass mental patients often turn the otherwise dead-on 70's T&A-fest into a tedious and embarrassing mess.

Your call, really.

Graduation day?
School Girls was Corarito's last official directing gig, but he stuck around the z-movie world for many years, eventually working for none other than Canucksploitation god Rafal Zielinksi. Pataki had a sweet gig for awhile as the voice of George Liquor on Ren & Stimpy. Bob Minor, now in his mid-sixties, is still acting and doing stunt work. Stucker died of AIDs in 1986. Colleen Brennan became one of the biggest porn stars of the 80's, and also acted (as Sharon Kelly) in Chuck Vincent's 1988 women-in-prison howler Slammer Girls. Buck Flower lived until he died, in 2004. Most of the other girls were one-time actors, including, unfortunately, the striking Zoe Grant. Her, I'd watch in anything. Well, not this again, but anything else.

Availability: Delinquent School Girls is available on DVD.

Clip: Delinquent School Girls trailer

- Ken McIntyre

Meatballs 4 (1992)

Directed by Bob Logan
Starring Corey Feldman, Jack Nance, Sarah Douglas
Rated R
USA

"I collect rocks."
"Wow, that's very boring of you."

Halfway through watching this, I felt so fatigued I had to lie down on the couch. I took a feverish hour-long nap wherein I dreamt I was shoved into a sweltering, overcrowded prison cell with four other dudes. I asked one guy what he was planning on doing that day.
"I'm going to try to roll over," he said. It was very close quarters. I woke up with a start, and after shaking off the post-nightmare hangover, got back to work. When the film started rolling again, I realized why my subconscious dredged up a prison metaphor. Everyone in Meatballs 4 is such an unpleasant creep, you literally feel like you're trapped in the movie with them. You know, like you do in the first couple Texas Chainsaw Massacres. I'm pretty sure this is not the proper emotional response for a summer camp movie. It doesn't help that the camp is run by Jack Nance (Eraserhead). Not only is his performance seriously queasy - he's a mess of twitches, grimaces, beads of sweat, and grime - but it's always a little disturbing to see him in color and out of the Eraserhead universe, as if he'd somehow escaped, like Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm St 2.

Nothing is right about Meatballs 4. It's not even a Meatballs movie, and even if it were, it would have arrived nearly a decade too late. Nobody had even thought about the Meatballs franchise in years, and both of the previous sequels were bombs. Furthermore, M4's star, Corey Feldman, was riding full-speed on his inexorable downward spiral by the early 1990's. No longer a beloved childhood actor and hobbled by his split from Corey Haim and whatever was up with that Michael Jackson phase he went through, Feldman entered adulthood with an excess of confidence that belied his actual position in Hollywood. In films like this and Rock N' Roll High School Forever (1991), he was horribly miscast in Ferris Buehler-esque roles that were meant to exude roguish charm, but he came off as petulant, desperate, and highly unlikable. Like a douchebag, in other words. In Meatballs 4, he is King of the Douchebags, so noxious that even the other douches in the movie - and there are many - don't even like him. I suppose that's impressive, in some twisted way.

Meatballs 4 actually started life as Happy Campers. That title would have been just as inaccurate, but slightly less misleading. Clearly someone at MGM thought slapping the Meatballs name on it might make it more palatable, somehow. Unfortunately, it just makes you wish you were watching an actual summer camp movie, like the original, or even Summer Camp, or Party Camp, or even Sleepaway Camp. At least those films had actual campers.

Before we get into the actual plot, I'd like to point out the level of comedy we're dealing with. Here's some dialogue from the 'getting off the bus on the first day and seeing some ripe bosoms wrapped in a halter-top scene':

Wes: "I'm getting a good feeling about this place."
Howie: "I'm getting the same feeling."
Victor: "I'm getting a woody!"

Or how about this zinger, uttered later on in the film, right before a game of 'jet ski chicken':

Ricky: "Wait, wait! I think I lost a contact lens!"
Jennifer: "But Ricky, you don't wear contact lenses!"
Ricky: "Oh yeah, right. Let's go!"

It never gets funnier than that. And that very barely registers as comedy in the first place.

And so, it's the last two weeks of summer. Lakeside is not actual a camp at all, it's a water-skiing school. Neil (Nance) has been running it for years with his granddaughter, Kelly (Deborah Tucker, Dr. Giggles). As the film begins, a yellow bus driven by a crazy old woman pulls up and drops off a load of assholes, bikini girls, and one fat kid, Victor (the awesomely named Johnny Cocktails). Mr. Cocktails does his best to act like the timid, put-upon chubbo in Meatballs 4, and although he is surely fat, he really seems to be faking the 'Gosh, did I do that?' actions of the character, particularly when he's being bullied. It's very distracting. He really seems like he ought to be chugging booze and banging that hot Asian chick, not flinching from the cruelties of the two idiots he's bunking with.

Said idiots are Wes (Bojesse Christopher) and Howie (J Trevor Edmond - these two even have jerky names in real life!), and both are exactly the same characters: sneering bullies who part their hair in the middle. The only reason they exist in this film is to torment - without humor - the fat kid. Again, these are horror movie characters shoved into a supposed comedy, and it's painful to watch. Besides bumbling around a bit, Victor never even does anything to incur their pathological wrath, except, perhaps, when he shrugs them off his back during the film's only discernible 'summer camp movie' sequence.

Wes and Howie decide to spy on the girls while they're showering, so they use Victor to to stand on so they can get a good view. Classic teen-sex hijinks for sure, and the shower shots provide a gratifying eyeful. And then a skunk comes trundling around the corner, causing Vic to freak out and drop the studs. They land in some conveniently-placed trash cans, covered in muck, and later Victor accidentally shoves them into the shower, while the girls scream and freak out. And for that, they torment him mercilessly for the rest of the movie. Dicks.

The plot, too, echoes the typical summer camp storyline. Sort of. Lakeside is having financial problems, and they've been forced to cut down their staff. Hoping to boost the school's status on the lake, Neil hires Ricky Wade (Feldman), the recreational director from rival, erm, resort Twin Oaks, to turn Lakeside around. Ricky arrives via parachute jump, plopping into the lake with a boombox strapped to his chest. He sloshes up to shore and is greeted with rapturous applause. Cue the first of many water-skiing montages, interspersed with literally painful gags like this:

A girl blows up a duck-shaped pool-float while Feldman watches her.
"What are you doing?" She asks him, annoyed.
"Wishing I were a duck," he says.

Many tedious minutes later, vampy Monica Shavetts (Sarah Douglas, instantly recognizable as Ursa, evil space-villain from Superman II), the wealthy owner of several summer resorts - including Twin Oaks - arrives at Lakeside to offer Neil half a million dollar for the camp. She wants to build a resort on the property. He, of course, flatly refuses.
"You don't give a damn about this lake," he rattles. "All you're interested in is the money." Etc.

That night, Neil and Ricky throw a party in one of the cabins. A big-titted Asian chick (1992 Playboy playmate Cristy Thom) saunters up to the door.
"Hi," she says to Neil. "My name's Hillary. My friends call me Hilly."
"I bet they do!" Says Neil, ogling her cleavage.
"Are you checking IDs tonight?" She asks.
"Naw," says Neil.
"Good!" Chirps Hillary. "Because all I brought was my IUD!"
Later on inside the party, Wes walks up to Hillary and attempts to hit on her.
She snorts. "You know, you really should stop buying your aftershave at yard sales."
Of course, the only reason they party scene exists is so that Corey Feldman can do one of his Michael Jackson dance routines. When he finishes (with en especially gay flourish), he says, "Elvis has left the building!"
He really says that. I understand that Bob Logan wrote the words for him, but I'm pretty sure that's what he would have said anyway.

As with any summer camp movie, there's a meet/contest with the rival camp/resort/ski school coming up. Neil figures that if they beat Twin Oaks in...competitive water skiing, I suppose...then they'll drive up their camper/student numbers.

And so, there's a nearly endless amount of water-ski footage to endure, punctuated with shots of the goony judges. Lakeside wins. Afterward, there's a 'strip charades' scene.

There's some eye-gouging subplots involving Ricky's relationship with Kelly and Victor's attempts to woo Hillary. Meanwhile, Monica's two stooges are dispatched to Lakeside to make life there miserable, so the campers/students/skiers will bankrupt Neil with refund requests. They throw live rats into the stew and force the campers/vacationers/etc. to strip naked at gunpoint in the woods.

They even add blue tempura paint into the water supply in the shower room, with hee-larious results.

And then they have another meet. I honestly don't know what happens then, because I couldn't take it anymore. I'm rooting for some sort of tragedy, though.

One of the least funny 'comedies' I've ever seen - and look around, man, I'm balls-deep in awful around here - Meatballs 4 is a massive failure on every level. As mentioned, it gave me a fucking nightmare. Chuck Vincent's movies might be terrible, but they never caused me to wake up in a cold sweat.

Meatballs V?
Jack Nance is dead. Bob Logan made Repossessed two years before this, and toiled away in obscure TV shows ever since. Corey Feldman appeared in Lost Boys: The Tribe, which did nothing to help his cause. He remains one of the most repellent 'celebrities' ever. Johnny Cocktails is a busy character actor in some pretty meaty shows and movies, including Weeds, Pushing Daisies, Get Smart, and the upcoming Funny People. Dunno where Paige French is these days (she played Jennifer in this travesty), but her, we'd like to see more of.

Availability: Meatballs 4 is available on DVD.

- Ken McIntyre

Satan's Cheerleaders (1977)

Directed by Greydon Clark
Starring Hillary Horan, Kerry Sherman, John Ireland, Yvonne DeCarlo
Rated R
USA

"Kill...kill...mutilate!"

Greydon Clark had already given the world the masterful blaxploitation classic Black Shampoo (1975) and the somewhat less-masterful but still sorta-awesome blax/'Namsploitation knuckle-dragger The Bad Bunch (1976) when he concocted this delirious slice of drive-in madness. Talk about being on a roll. Satan's Cheerleaders was destined for infamy on it's name alone - there's already been a couple bands and an actual cheer squad (sorta) that's appropriated the moniker, and let's face it, it's just fun to say - but beyond it obvious shlock appeal, this is actually a tremendously fun film.

Satan's Cheerleaders is actually two movies for the price of one. It's like a vinyl LP: there's the cheerleader side, and the Satan side. Up first, the breezy teen sex comedy. We open with a frolic on the beach. We meet our four heroines: Patti, the vacuous blonde (Kerry Sherman), Debbie (Alisa Powell), the slutty one, Sharon (Sherry Marks) , the half-intelligent one, and Chris (adorable, pint-sized Hillary Horan), the feisty one.

They're practicing their cheers under the watchful eye of their coach, wide-eyed innocent Ms. Johnson (Jaqueline Cole), when the football team shows up to goose the girls and cause all manner of teenage hijinks. Then the coach (Joseph Carlo), an antiquated 50's throwback with Brylcreem in his hair, shows up to grouse and grimace. And then the rival football team (and their cheerleaders) show up to kick sand around. Ms. Johnson proposes a 'chicken fight', and our girls decisively win. But does the rivalry end there? Oh, no.

The next day the girls are goofing around on the field with star quarterback Stevie (Lane Caudell). He starts to take off his pants, and I'm pretty sure they're planning a gang-bang, but then the rival team shows up again to pelt the girls with water balloons. So far, none of this appears to be at all scripted. It's just a bunch of girls wailing on each other. Pretty awesome. The movie could've just continued on like this, and it would have been a winner. But then Billy the Janitor shows up, and things really get nuts.

Billy (Jack Kruschen) is a strutting, barrel-chested 60 year old with an extravagant mustache and a workshirt bedazzled with rhinestones. He looks like a cross between a gay Santa Claus and legendary ladies-man and cult movie director Ted V Mikels. Billy is the classic creepy, put-upon janitor who stutters and mutters under his breath about who he's gonna "Show these r-r-r-rotten kids someday." Oh, and will he ever.


But first, since we are still balls-deep in the teen sex comedy portion of this evening's entertainment, there's the obligatory locker room/shower scene. Seems there's a big game across town tonight, and no place to change there, so the girls'll have to do it now. A likely story, but who cares? The cheerleaders lather up and dance around suggestively in the shower for a good five minutes. Unfortunately, we must detract a couple points because Horan, who clearly has the best rack of the quartet, is the only one who doesn't get naked. That smarted a little. Oh, and Billy has a secret hole in the shower wall where he can peep on the girls. Good one, Bill.

A bunch of mindless stuff happens, but the important bit is when Billy snoops around in the girls locker room after they leave, grabbing dirty towels and chanting incantations while fingering a primitive pentagram necklace. Could Billy be...a Satanist? Yep.

The girls head out for the big game and barely get out of the school's parking lot before they're run off the road. They're completely stumped as to what to do next. Sharon stares at the hood of the car and says "There has to be a motor under here!" Indeed.

Luckily, Billy shows up in his pick-up truck and offers them a ride. The girls are naturally uneasy about it, but with limited options (not really, but whatever), they decide to take him up on it. As Patti climbs into the back of the truck, Billy violently grabs her ass and pushes her in. You can practically hear Kerry Sherman screaming "What the fuck?" at Kruschen after they got the take. Ms Johnson rides up front, and Billy gets grabby with her, too. Something is very rotten in Denmark. Ms Johnson demands he let them out of the truck, but he refuses, driving them to a remote bit of woods where they stumble on a hilariously cheesy sacrificial altar. Basically, it's a stone and a stick and a dimestore monster mask. Still, it holds some strange powers over them.

Everyone falls into a trance, and Patti strips naked. She climbs onto the altar and lies down. There's a psychedelic light show and some jarring monster sounds. And then Billy drops dead.

The girls snap out of it and take off. The run into John Carradine, who was already taking any job that came his way at this point. He's the local psychotic bum who tries to warn them off. They do not listen, and eventually run into Sheriff Bub(legendary character actor John Ireland). Sheriff Beezle Bub. Beezle-Bub, who owns two Doberman pinchers, named Lucifer and Diablo. And yet, no warning bells go off for our heroines. What are you gonna do? They're cheerleaders, man.

Bub has a weird wife named Emmy (Lily Munster herself, Yvonne DeCarlo), who assures the girls that all will soon be well and gives them some tea. Satanic tea! This distracts the girls enough for Bub to go out, revive Billy, kick his ass and kill him again, rape Ms. Johnson (!), and then gather all the local loonies to prepare for a black mass of some stripe.

The girls finally get it and bail, splitting up in different directions, all in the hopes of finding a phone, or at least some non devil-worshipping local to help them out. Patti stays back to stare down Emmy. Chris gets to a phone booth, but there's a long-haired cowboy in there. After banging on the door, he finally lets her in, but then snips the telephone cord. Only then does she notice that he's wearing the devil-necklace. Debbie finds a weird-mustachioed stuttering farmer digging a ditch, and when she asks him for help, he flashes his Satanic jewelry, as well. Sharon runs into a chicken-feeding monk and immediately falls to her knees, clutching his robe and begging for help. When he rebuffs her, she looks up to see his necklace.
"Jesus," she says.
"Not quite," he laughs.

The girls are rounded up by the half-assed demonic cabal and marched to the barn. They're left there with Lucifer and Diablo standing guard outside. By the way, I cannot express to you how awesome the camera angles are in this film. Cinematographer Dean Cundey has a jaw-dropping resume - he's shot everything from Black Shampoo to Jurassic Park, with scads of cult classics like Rollerboogie and The Thing in-between - but, quite arguably, this is his masterpiece. Every single chance he has in this film to shoot a cheerleader's panty-clad ass or bouncing boobs, he takes it. Dean Cundey, we salute you.

Where was I? Oh, the girls escape when Patti hypnotizes the dogs, and they take off in the woods. They skulk around in the dark for awhile, until they hear a noise in the distance. "I hope it's only like, two guys," feisty Chris says, "So we can overpower them." Unfortunately, it's the whole backwoods Satanic army. They corral the girls once more and march 'em to the sacrificial altar.

Meanwhile, back at the Beezle Bub ranch, High Priestess Emmy has had about enough of these fuckin' cheerleaders as she's going to take. Her gobbledy-gook chanting ("Aba Tura Satana!") suddenly becomes far more pointed.

"Answer my prayers, Satan," She yelps. "Kill...mutilate!" As she says this, the room glows red and dishes start to rattle. The whole room starts shaking, in the most low-budget, cost-effective, shoddy-Wednesday-night-TV-movie way possible, i.e. some dude shakes a houseplant, his arm just out of the camera's range, and the curtains, via transparent string, start to twist themselves up in a most (non) alarming way. Emmy's incantations reach their crescendo as her two bloodthirsty dogs burst through the windows (this is repeated half a dozen times in quick succession; it is, after all, a money shot) and advance on her. So that's pretty much the end of Emmy.

Back at the sacrificin' stump, the sheriff and his motley crew of mustache farmers and cretins are ready to get the evening's entertainment rolling. One by one, he tosses the girls on the slab, asking the big Satan head which one the virgin is. The cheerleaders find this highly amusing. "Is she the maiden, o master?" asks Bub, shoving Chris towards the rock.
"I'm no maiden, man," Chris laughs. I've been a cheerleader for three years!"

Well, big shocker: none of the girls are virgins. Also, Patti's pissed.
"You toad, you worm, you crawling miserable man!" She snarls at Bub, explaining that there really was a virgin in their midst - 26 year old Ms. Johnson - but since he went and raped her in the woods, well, the whole virgin sacrifice scheme is well-fucked. Bub, at this point, is quite confused. "Look," he says, pulling a tape recorder out of thin air, "This is where the sound was coming from!" (There was a lot of demonic wooshing going on). "It's just a trick!" I'm sure I missed something, but I don't really get why he was conning the entire town into a bogus Satanic cult. Unless, of course, it was all a ruse to fuck cheerleaders. That, I would totally understand. Anyway, unfortunately for Bub and his buffoons, Patti really is channeling the powers of darkness. And they are all about to feel her wrath.

In the typically fuck-everything epilogue, Patti, now proudly wearing the macramé faux-pentagram and permanently stuck with the crazy-girl gaze, stomps onto the playing field during a crucial moment in the game against Baker High. Stuporstar quarterback Stevie has twisted his ankle, and all appears lost. Patti simply stares at his leg, and he jumps up, good as new.
"I've got a feeling we're going to be winning a lot of games from now on," beams Ms. Johnson.
As if demonic possession is a positive trait in a cheerleader. The brilliance of this throwaway ending is that it flies directly in the face of 70's demon-fear. Exorcism be damned, baby. The devil wins.


Quite clearly a genre classic, Satan's Cheerleaders makes a lot out of very little. The budget could not have amounted to more than pocket change, the nudity is minimal, and the special effects are non-existent, and yet it scratches every sleaze-beast itch: boners are popped, and ribs are tickled. Look past the cheap thrills and you'll start to notice the cracks in the veneer, but even then, the wildly uneven dialogue, the wonky editing and the hilariously threadbare production design only enhance the experience. It's junk, for sure, but it's such glorious, eager-to-please junk that you cannot help to fall under it's idiotic spell.

Clark showed no signs of slowing down after this one hit the drive-ins and grindhouses, and he continued spitting out low-budget mayhem like Joysticks (1983) and Lambada, the Forbidden Dance (1990), for the next 20 years. Billy the janitor went on to play a judge in half a zillion sitcoms. Sorta surprisingly, none of the cheerleaders went on to the cult-actress careers you'd imagine Satan's Cheerleaders would provide. Sherman landed a role on a soap opera for a good portion of the 80's, Powell appeared in the infamous Toolbox Murders (1978) and a Gilligan's Island TV movie, but quit acting in 1978. Sherry Marks appeared in only one other film, Hometown USA (1979), and our girl Horan did bit roles on various sitcoms (Joanie Loves Chachi, Mork and Mindy, Facts of Life), but hasn't acted since 1982. We still feel sorta cheated about that shower scene, Hillary, and quietly await your comeback. Please make it full-frontal, if possible.

Mandatory viewing, quite obviously. And if you can hunt down any LPs from Sonoma, who provided the bitchin' disco tunes on the soundtrack, all the better. Satan AND cheerleaders...you really can't miss with this one.

Availability: Satan's Cheerleaders is available on DVD.

Link: Greydon Clark's official website
Link: Satan's Cheerleaders fansite

Clip: Satan's Cheerleaders trailer.

-Ken McIntyre

PS: If anyone has a copy of The Facts of Life, Season one (1980) episode 13, titled "Dope", starring Hillary Horan as "Tumpy" (!) could you send it to me?

Thank you in advance.

Student Bodies (1981)

Directed by Mickey Rose
Starring Kristen Riter, Joe Talarowski, The Stick
Rated R
USA

"Garbage gets me hot."

Right, so "Student Bodies". The name implies, well, naked college girls, doesn't it? Not so, my friend. In this case, it refers to corpses. In 1981, the slasher movie was in full-frenzy, and in grand Hollywood tradition (Scary Movie, anyone?), a parody film was rushed out to cash in. Slasher films are very close to self-parody anyway, so it's not like Student Bodies was making much of a statement, but regardless, it has its oddball charms.

The story takes place on Halloween. And on Friday the 13th. And on Jamie Lee Curtis's birthday (Nov 22nd, by the way, if you want to send her a card). Julie (Angela Bressler, in her only performance) is babysitting. Toby (Kristen Riter, also a one-time actress) calls her to warn her not to do anything wild or crazy, since wild and crazy things might happen as a result. Toby is clearly our designated "final girl'. Julie hears a cat outside, but when she pokes her head out to check, it's actually a fluffy dog. What? Naturally, she leaves the door unlocked (we know this because there's an onscreen graphic that points to the door and reads 'unlocked'.) All of this is shot exactly like a straight-ahead slasher. So much so that the goofy elements seem wildly out of place.

Julie is being stalked by a very annoying, Asthmatic killer called The Breather (voiced, but not acted, by Richard Belzer). 'The Breather' keeps calling her on the phone. At one point, some sort of viscous liquid pours out. Dunno if it's supposed to be spit or semen, but it's pretty gross. Despite being rattled by the obscene caller, Julie decides it's time for a snack, and wanders into the pitch-black kitchen. She opens the fridge and grabs a fried chicken leg when her boyfriend Charlie (Keith Singleton) sneaks up behind her and grabs her.
It's actually a pretty scary moment.
"What's that chickeny taste?" He asks, when she stops screaming, and he kisses her.
"Chicken," she tells him.

They go upstairs to bone while the Breather goes over his weapons, figuring out what to kill them with. He chooses a paperclip, and starts climbing up the stairs. There are a lot of stairs.
"I hope I don't die first," wheezes The Breather.
And then, who knows what happens? It's dark. Julie gets offed, somehow. A naked Charlie finds her on the bed and tries to figure out what's wrong with her.
"Julie, you're not responding to my maleness!"

An hour or so later, Mom and dad come home (from watching a horror movie, naturally), but Julie is nowhere to be found.
"I hope she's not murdered on our bed," says dad.
Unfortunately, sir, that's exactly where she is.

Cut to: a double funeral for Julie and Charlie, held at their school.
Bertha (Anita Taylor) and Jeff get horny at the funeral, you know, like you do at funerals, and decide to fuck in Jeff's car. He runs off to get protection, and Bertha gets her skull bashed in with a wooden horse. And then Jeff gets suffocated with a garbage bag.

Then a blind guy and a crippled guy get into a fight over a parking space.
The guy in the wheelchair says: "I'm more handicapped then you, I can't even make love to a woman."
The blind guy says, "Oh yeah? I can't even find a woman."
He has a point. I'm not sure how he drove to school, though.

So then we meet the woodshop teacher, Mr Dumpkin (Joe Flood, Delta Fever), a maniac who is obsessed with horse-head bookends. That might be a clue. In fact, it almost certainly is, because there's an on-screen graphic that reads "Clue" and points to a box in the woodshop.

And then, there's a locker room scene, but it's from The Breather's point of view. He gets too worked-up and blacks out when the girls start taking their shirts off. By the time he wakes up, they're fully dressed and on their way to the gym already. Stupid Breather.

The virginal Toby is the last one in the locker room. She's startled by The Breather as she's getting dressed, and he chases her through the halls of the school. She never actually puts on her shirt, she just holds it in front of her, which is a nice touch. She ends up in the boiler room, where she's cornered by the creepy janitor, Malvert (The Stick). Luckily, he just wanted help with his crossword puzzle. She escapes, but is now Scooby Doo-ing her way around, intent on cracking the case.

Then there's a parade.
"I'd like to make a special appeal to the killer," says the principal, during his welcome speech, "Hasn't there been enough senseless killing? Let's have a murder that makes sense."
During the parade, another horny young couple, Ralph (Tom Cannon II) and Dagmar (Tammie Tignor...why did no one in this film ever act again? Was there some sort of tragedy on wrap day?) crawl into a bull float to bone, but The Breather kills them with an eggplant. Toby discovers the bodies, and is therefore blamed for 'em.

And then some guy comes on the screen to tell us that we're not getting any tits. And then he says "Fuck You" to secure an R rating. Haha.

They send Toby to see a psychiatrist, Dr Sigmund (Carl Peters, RIP), but being insane himself, he draws no conclusions. Meanwhile, The Breather continues to stalk the student body. There's a football game that features a hilariously belligerent hot dog salesman (if you want mustard, he'll just spray it right into your stupid face!), Malvert and his blow-up fuck doll girlfriend (she's filled with helium, for some reason, and floats away), and yet another couple who sneak off to have sex, and then get moidered by The Breather. Later on, Breather calls the principal and tells him that his next murder spree will take place at the prom. Toby gets wind of the plot (yes, the scene involves fart jokes), and decides to infiltrate the prom in disguise to unmask the killer. She chooses a hooker outfit, which is a little weird for the prom, but her tits looks fantastic in the outfit, so whatever.


The teachers decide that, since all the potential prom queens are dead except for Patti (Sara Eckhardt), they won't name anybody queen this year. In fact, they just give the crown to Principal Peters (Joe Talarowski). Patti does not take the news well.
"I want to slash my face," she snarls. "If I can't be the prettiest girl in school, than I'll be the ugliest!"

She was a safe distance from prettiest anyway, if we're gonna be honest here. Anyway, the resident ROTC nut convinces her that sex will ease her pain, and they bail.
Of course, Patti and war-kid get separated, and she gets murdered. When he comes back, he sees her corpse and tosses his condom.
"Well, guess I won't be needing this," he says, as he unzips his pants.
So, necrophilia is ok, but no naked tits?

Then Toby has a really inappropriate conversation with the principal, who is in his underwear. He also has 'I Love New York' written on his chest. He tells her how difficult it is to keep his clothes on with all these 'naughty' high school girls around. And then he excuses himself to go get a typing trophy. He didn't win it, he just wants to show it to Toby. And then he slips on some marbles (?) and stabs himself in the ass with the trophy. To death. He is not The Breather, however. He is just a weirdo.

Speaking of weird, the final segment is seriously bananas. Toby runs down the hallway while calliope music plays and Mr Dumpkin hurls horse-head bookends at her. Then the vice principal, Miss Mumsley (Mimi Weddell, 94 years old and still acting at the time of this writing) climbs into a trashcan and chases her in it. Plus there's zombies. The Stick's fuckdoll is in there, too. And then there's a shock ending. And then there's a twist.

And then there's another twist!
It is a slasher movie, after all.

One thing you'll notice pretty quickly about Student Bodies is how much of a debt Scream (1996) owes to it. In fact, compare the two, and you'll find all of those accolades Wes Craven received for deconstructing and satirizing the slasher formula ought to be handed right over to our man, writer/director Mickey Rose, because a lot of it was lifted straight from here: the self-aware horror movie stereotypes, the scary opening kill (ok, the farting dog and the paperclips throw it off, but otherwise, it does have some very effective scares), the multiple-killer reveal (not a spoiler; it's just one of many reveals), etc. All of it sprang from the fertile mind of Mr Rose in 1981. Which, if you think about it, is pretty remarkable, since the slasher movie was still in its infancy at that point. Incredibly, Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) were so wildly influential that no one ever strayed much from their blueprint, so the various gags and set-pieces in Student Bodies are still just as recognizable now as they were almost 30 years ago.

You may also notice that Student Bodies is pretty funny. Mr Rose made his bones writing jokes and routines for all the comedy greats, everyone from Sid Caesar to Johnny Carson. He was also Woody Allen's writing partner for many years, and co-wrote several of Allen's films, including Bananas (1971) and What's Up Tiger Lily (1966). Good ol' Mick. That cat was a champ.

That being said, the lack of nudity and gore severely dampens Student Bodies' chances of ever attracting the cult following it should have. Dispensing with the genre's two most important elements is a fatal flaw that the film never really recovers from. That's a shame, because it really is a fun and very witty movie, with an adorable final girl, and perhaps the greatest red herring of all time: Malvert the Janitor. The actor who played Malvert, known simply as "The Stick", was apparently a stand-up comedian at the time. He is one of the oddest looking people I've ever seen. He's got to be nearly seven feet tall, painfully skinny, with no chin, and beady rat-eyes. He's also double-jointed and frequently bends his arms and legs at odd angles, which is more terrifying than it is funny. Unfortunately, like most of the cast, this was The Stick's only film. Lord knows where he is now, but he is surely out there somewhere, probably scaring kids to death.

Coincidentally, another slasher parody, Saturday the 14th, was also released in 1981. That one is pretty good as well, but it has no The Stick, so Student Bodies wins whatever sick game we're playing.

Availability: Student Bodies is available on DVD.

Clip: Student Bodies trailer!

- Ken McIntyre