The Great American Girl Robbery (1979)

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

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.

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.

This movie seems to combine the 70's drive-in fascination with the Patty Hearst kidnapping with its fascination for sexy cheerleaders. Three squads of cheerleaders are on their way to a competition and for some reason are sharing a single school bus (even though one is a tough, inner-city squad and another is from an elite private school) when they are all kidnapped and held for ransom by a group of ex-jocks who call themselves the National American Liberation Army. There's the usual sexploitation filler--the captors and the cheerleaders kill time by having a topless beauty contest, lead Kristine DeBell has (offscreen) sex with the good guy kidnapper,and the lone female kidnapper (who is of course a lesbian) seduces one of the other girls in a bathtub. Finally, the three teams ban together to fight back, which mainly involves a long, gratuitous scene where they all strip off their underwear and fashion it into a rope which they use to trip one of the kidnappers. (Someone could have just stuck her foot out, but where's the fun in that?)This movie is surprisingly politically incorrect. The black kidnapper is the bad guy while the handsome white kidnapper turns out to be a sympathetic good guy. Still it's refreshing to actually see a black villain for a change and he's the best actor in the movie next to Kristine DeBell. DeBell, of course, was the talented and appealing actress whose career was ruined when it was found out that she had earlier appeared in a porno movie (strangely, a similar thing happened to untalented boob-job Michelle Bauer, but that didn't stop her from going on to appear in 500 low-budget movies that were even worse than her early porno efforts--go figure). This is neither the best of the cheerleader movies (try "The Swinging Cheerleaders", "The Pom-Pom Girls", or "Satan's Cheerleaders")nor the best of the Patty Hearst/kidnapping movies (try "The Candy Snatchers", "Sweet Sugar" or "Abduction"), but if you like mixing your poisons, by all means, check it out.

The classification of this movie into "Horror" isn't really appropriate. It's basically a goofy flick with lots of bared flesh and a plot involving the kidnap of a busload of cheerleaders on their way to a competition. There's never any danger and it all has a happy ending. The reason to see it is simple: you like watching goofy mindless 1980's-era teenage exploitation flicks, and they don't come any more to the point than this. The ultimate mid-1980's tour de force!