The Great American Girl Robbery (1979)

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.

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!