Mach mich nicht an!

After a long hot summer, it's back to school for the students of Rosedale High, where an impending football game against arch rivals Hardin leads to a series of high-spirited pranks carried out by Rosedale's star players Jesse and Johnnie (Michael Mullins and Robert Carradine) and members of the sexy cheer-leading squad, the feisty pom pom shakers including lovely brunette Laurie (Jennifer Ashley) and pretty blonde Sally (Lisa Reeves).

The Pom Pom Girls is a fairly typical slice of 70s teenage drive-in fodder, full of hot girls and hunky guys whose lives mainly revolve around their cars and who they're canoodling with in the back seat. It's clichéd and predictable stuff but achieves a certain lackadaisical charm thanks to an amiable cast and a suitably inconsequential approach to its plot—as the viewer, we have no idea where we're being taken, but we're still happy to go along for the ride.

It's hard to know what to make of The Pom Pom Girls. Though the producers of this flick clearly knew what they were doing when they cooked up that moniker to lure in their target young male audience, the title has very little to do with the movie they actually made. There are indeed cheerleaders in this film, but most of them are essentially used for set dressing while the bulk of the proceedings fixate upon the shenanigans carried out by two of the football players they're on hand to cheer for. Obviously crafted on a grindhouse budget and with that mindset, The Pom Pom Girls further confounds expectations by eschewing the anticipated exploitation elements to devote most of its run-time to a series of tepid vignettes that aren't connected with any real story to speak of, then abruptly swerving into a fairly straight teen drama in the the third act (reportedly, 80 seconds of nudity and language were excised from the original R-rated cut to earn the film a wider PG release, which is the version that most commonly circulates now). The end result is a movie that is roughly half decent and half pointless, which makes delivering a firm recommendation somewhat of a challenge.

The centerpieces of the action here are Johnny and Jesse, two best friends gearing up for their upcoming high school gridiron season. They spend most of this caper wandering from one misadventure to the next with little rhyme or reason: driving around, eating burgers at the local hangout, making out with various girls, defacing the cars at their rival school, having food fights, urinating out of their classroom windows, then stealing a fire truck and nearly murdering the town Sheriff with it (you know, normal teenage stuff). Though presented in a light-hearted way, their antics are more hm-amusing than sincerely ha-ha-humorous, which leaves the comedy quotient here severely lacking. The tenor of the film shifts for the better when the duo finally couples up with Laurie and Sally, the main Pom Pom Girls they've been casually chasing from the start. Suddenly, actual storylines begin taking shape: Johnny contends with the increasingly volatile machinations of his gal's jealous ex-boyfriend, as Jesse struggles to kick his habit of bedding a bevy of lasses in the back of his van and commit to just one while also butting heads with the team's despotic coach. From this point forward, PPG remains a far cry from the nuanced character studies in Dazed And Confused, but the narrative at least finds some sense of purpose and the last 30 minutes are a vast improvement because of it.

It's interesting to see a pre-Revenge Of The Nerds Robert Carradine tackle the leading man role, particularly because his Johnny is pretty much the same soon-to-be iconic goofball minus the glasses and few braincells. Only here, that mien results in him being a popular football player who's impressively successful with the ladies (who knew a change of clothes and a pair of spectacles could make a young man's social fortunes plummet so drastically?). TV cop show stalwart Michael Mullins does a capable job of bringing Jesse to life, while the spotlit Jennifer Ashley and Lisa Reeves are both attractive and likeable enough to distinguish themselves as the clear stand-outs among their fellow Pom Poms.

However, the most engrossing elements in this effort are an accidental product of its era. This is a thoroughly '70s film, and since it's singularly focused on youth culture a lot of the best aspects of that decade play prominent roles. The small town where the action takes place is straight out of a simpler time, while notable features like the bustling carhop, roads with no traffic, and wide open plots of waterfront sand without another beachgoer in sight offer glimpses of a world which sadly does not exist anymore. The classic cars and vintage clothes are all authentic in a way that no modern period piece could ever faithfully duplicate, and even without the benefit of a purse large enough to license popular contemporary songs for the soundtrack, all of the needfully obscure music used in the film sets the tone very well.

In the end, you can't sincerely fault The Pom Pom Girls for not being what it appears to be, since what it really is has more than enough charms to justify the 85-minutes you'll spend with it. If you're so inclined, give it a look for the beautiful girls, good tunes, and a vivid snapshot of high school in the 1970's. Anyone likely to be interested in a B-grade relic like this has undoubtedly invested much more energy for a much more meager payoff than that.

This is a rare film in that it is a 1970's teen movie that seems to have been genuinely aimed at 1970's teens (rather than drooling adult perverts). The so-called "teen sexploitation" genre would become really big in the early 1980's era of "Porky's" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont", and is still going strong today even in these censorial times. Personally though, the 80's films remind me too much of my own adolescence, and I prefer to leave the modern-day teen films to modern-day teens, but I just can't get enough of the 70's teen films though. Unfortunately, while many of these films are nominally ABOUT 70's teens, very few seem to actually be made FOR 70's teens. Take, for instance, "The Cheerleaders", the movie that started off the craze for sexy and sex-crazed high school and collegiate cheerleaders, which may be considered a classic by some, but can hardly be considered even a remotely realistic portrayal of teenage life in 70's America. The same can be said with the rest of the cheerleader films (which eventually reached their logical culmination in the hardcore classic "Debbie Does Dallas").

This film is different, however, in that it seems to be trying to capture the anarchic free spirit of the era more than just being an excuse to salivate over naked nubile bodies. It actually resembles "Dazed and Confused" (minus, of course, the self-conscious nostalgia) more than "The Cheerleaders". Of course, it's not all that realistic (the kids at one point steal a fire truck, which I think even in the 70's would have more likely been considered a serious felony than hilarious teen hijinks), and there IS some sex and nudity (naturally, with the ever-exploitable Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith in the cast).

There's no point in relating the plot because there really isn't one in these kind of movies--just a lot of random partying, sex, and wacky teen hijinks). The cast is pretty interesting. Besides Smith, there's Robert Carradine, the youngest Carradine brother, who was also in the minor cult film "Massacre at Central High" with Smith and the underrated "TAG:The Assassination Game", but is, of course, most famous for "Revenge of the Nerds". There's also Jennifer Ashley, a minor but ubiquitous drive-in queen, who even showed up in Mexican exploitation films like Rene Cardona Jr.'s sex and shark epic "Tintorera", and the luscious Susan Player who appeared in both American ("Malibu Beach") and European ("Las Adolescentes") exploitation fare. The director, Joseph Ruben, meanwhile would go on to direct "The Stepfather", one of the most cleverly subversive horror films of the Reagan era. This isn't quite as good as any of these aforementioned films (well, I guess it's better that "Tintotera"), but it's certainly worth seeing.

The little summary of the movie does a good job, that is basically the plot of the entire movie. You follow a group of teens, some on the cheerleading squad, some on the football team, run around and do pranks and make out. This goes on for an hour and twenty mins, and you honestly can't tell most of the teens apart or care about them, You get some nudity but it's few and far between for a "raunchy teen comedy." If that's why you're watching you'll have more luck just googling the nude scenes.

this is by no means a good movie,but being someone from so. cal during the seventies,this movie catches the feel better than most out there.the best movies for that feel were the ones made in the seventies.i enjoyed dazed and confused but in no way felt like the seventies.if you want to know how it was like for people who partied,then check it out