The second of three "Cheerleaders" movies in an ersatz trilogy from the 1970s, "The Swinging Cheerleaders" boasts direction by B-movie legend Jack Hill. His other efforts, notably "Switchblade Sisters" and various blaxploitation flicks, offer serious-minded, sometimes hard-edged looks at American life in the seventies. "The Swinging Cheerleaders" follows in a similar vein. For whatever reason, Hill wrote the script under the alias "Jane Witherspoon," which I suppose makes any perceivable objectification of women somehow forgivable. He and co-writer David Kidd (writing as "Betty Conkin"), however, went out of their way to make this film less like its predecessor in that the titular cheerleaders are given personalities resembling actual human beings. Kate (Jo Johnston) sets out write an expose of cheerleader life as a dissertation for a college class. She changes her mind when she realizes not only are the cheerleaders unexpectedly sweet, but the football players are all a real swell bunch as well! To add insult to injury, it turns out her former love interest, Ron (Ian Sander), is a real slimeball who calls his friends over for a group assault of cheerleader Andrea (the sublime Cheryl Smith). Gee, I guess the "campus radical" (there's only ONE?! Isn't this the 1970s?!) isn't such a peace-loving idealist after all! I guess Hill and Kidd really didn't like hippies for some reason. Anyway, I found this film to be too heavy on plot and WAY too light on humor. In fact, "The Swinging Cheerleaders" simply isn't much fun (at least not until the last five or ten minutes). That isn't to say it is a bad movie, but it just isn't what one would expect from one with this title. 5 out of 10 stars

So I sat down to watch this expecting a waste of 90 minutes of my life. Surprisingly I found myself actually enjoying this seedy little mid seventies sexsploitation piece.

The plot is nothing to speak of - journalism major decides to do a piece on swinging cheerleaders and their jock boyfriends.

Where the film surprises is in it's scripting - surprisingly liberated considering this was 1974 and somewhat witty with a bevy of interesting performances from a game cast, this turned out to be far more entertaining than expected.

Fun seventies drive-in fair and somewhat more layered than you may think. A solid six out of ten.

Needing another member for the cheerleading squad at Mesa State College the cheerleaders open tryouts for anyone who might be interested. As it so happens a student by the name of "Kate Corie" (Jo Johnston) auditions and is accepted even though the head cheerleader "Mary Ann Putnam" (Colleen Camp) is jealous of her for flirting with her boyfriend "Buck Larsen" (Ron Hajak) who happens to be the star quarterback. What nobody knows however is that Kate only wants to join the squad to dig up some dirt for her journalism term paper. And in the course of her work she discovers a lot more than people fully realize. Anyway, rather than divulge any more of the plot and risk spoiling the movie for those who haven't seen it I will just say that this particular film had a reputation for being somewhat sleazy when it first came out. However, while it certainly had some nudity and scenes of a sexual nature, it wasn't nearly as graphic as I had initially thought back then. Likewise, although it was definitely a low-budget drive-in type of movie that one would find back in the mid-70's, it had a fairly interesting plot which managed to keep my attention for the most part. At any rate, while it certainly wasn't a blockbuster film by any means it wasn't that terribly bad either. Accordingly, I give it an average rating.