The Great American Girl Robbery (1979)

Very Cool!!!

Just what I expected

How sad is this?

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

The highlight of CHEERLEADERS' WILD WEEKEND for me was the hot MILF lesbian school nurse played by buxom blonde Courtney Sands (who is not listed as making any other movies :-( ). Her attempted seduction of one of the rich girls by giving her a bath is HOT. The poor girl is afraid and doesn't want to play... even after the villainess exposes her own monumental rib flaps to her! The interruption by one of the male kidnappers is maddening! One wonders if the older dyke would have been successful.The clincher comes when the cheerleaders revolt and the kidnappers are tied up with the girls' underwear. The lesbian kidnapper has her mouth stuffed with her 'target''s panties (!!) and the girl tells her "that's as close as you'll ever get". (Cheers from the audience!)

The 70's cheerleader teen sexploitation sub-genre receives an appropriately sleazy send-off with this satisfyingly tacky effort. The plot is slight, but serviceable enough: three bitter disgruntled former high school football star athletes along with one jock's dippy younger brother and a ruthless lesbian school nurse abduct a bus full of beautiful bimbo cheerleaders. Okay, the story ain't much and the film itself plays out as more of a tense, straightforward suspense thriller rather than the expected goofy innocuous comic romp, but the flick's exemplary trash picture credentials alone make it a worthy addition to this nifty sub-genre. Producer William Osco previously cranked out numerous porno features and later made the enjoyably atrocious toxic waste monster clinker "The Being." Jason Williams, the star of the immortal X-rated sci-fi outing "Flesh Gordon," portrays the hunky head kidnapper. "The Hills Have Eyes" survivor Robert Houston plays another one of the kidnappers. "Penitentiary" series star Leon Isaac Kennedy appears acting under the alias Lee Curtis as a disc jockey (in real life Kennedy worked as a disc jockey prior to embarking on an acting career!). The cheerleaders are played by such scrumptious, often undraped seasoned junk flick veterans as Kristine DeBell (star of the hard-core fairytale offering "Alice in Wonderland"), Elizabeth Halsey (the dirty soft-core musical version of "Cinderella"), Wally Anne Wharton ("Up in Smoke"), Lenka Novak ("Coach," "Vampire Hookers"), Tracy Ann King (a.k.a. Marilyn Joi, "Hammer," "The Kentucky Fried Movie"), and Janie Squire (the skinny-dipper who gets munched at the start of "Piranha"). Jeff Werner's capable direction doesn't skimp on the good stuff: there's more gratuitous nudity than you can shake a pom-pom at, lots of gleefully gross lowbrow humor (the cheerleaders tie all their panties together so they can trip one of their abductors!), a splendidly stinky pseudo-disco score, a tasty lengthy topless beauty contest, pot smoking, hideously bad soft-rock songs, garish cinematography, and an absolute dearth of taste, subtlety and artistic refinement. In short, it's a solid piece of blithely low-grade and hence quite entertaining schlock.

Jason (FLESH GORDON himself) Williams stars as one of three disgraced, former football players (!) who decide to kidnap a bus load of high school cheerleaders to hold for ransom for $2 million bucks from the girls collective parents. Of course, the girls are resourceful and give the kidnappers a F...I...G...H...T! Hidden behind a title and cover promising cheap T&A thrills, this is a pretty entertaining kidnapping crime flick. Of course, the filmmakers do deliver the T&A thrills but they ain't cheap dammit! It works within the story as one of the kidnappers demands the cheerleaders strip and perform an impromptu beauty contest. Okay, it's cheap. There are also odd moments of comedy (the Governor refusing to pay the ransom but offering the family loans with low interest rates) and romance (Williams ends up hooking up with main cheerleader Kristine DeBell, who lets him get away in the end). The film also features one of cinema's most convenient fruit & vegetable stands for an opening truck crash.

There are a LOT of really awful sexploitation films out there, and normally I would admit that this is one of them. Except that there was ONE SCENE in this film that I found to be REALLY EROTIC, and because of that one scene I'm upping my rating from a "1" to a "9" (my credibility would be completely shot if I went any higher!) One of the other reviewers (lazarillo) mentions a topless beauty contest in which the kidnapped cheerleaders entertain themselves by dancing almost naked. It is during that scene when one of the bad guys grabs one of the girls (a very pretty blonde) whom he has already declared to be his favorite. But the female kidnapper stops him (threatening to shoot him), and then she takes the frightened girl into the bathroom with her, offering to give the girl a bath. The ensuing scene is very tender and soft as she bathes and comforts the girl. As a lesbian seduction scene it was cut short by the appearance by one of the stupid guys, but it was INCREDIBLY EROTIC until that point! I've never seen another sexploitation film come close to matching it. In fact, it was hotter than most XXX films, not that that's saying much.