Attack of the 50 Foot Cheerleader (2012)

Cassie Stratford (Jena Sims) is a Freshman pledge to the Zeta Mu sorority as well as a hopeful for the cheerleading squad at Iron Coast University.  Only problem is, this is largely due to being pushed by her mom Brenda (Sean Young) into following in her footsteps.  When it comes down to it, Cassie is uncoordinated and has a bad complexion, two things that make cheerleading tryouts quite difficult - as squad and sorority leader Brittany (Olivia Alexander) makes quite clear.

Hope comes in the form of an experimental drug she and lab mate Kyle (Ryan Merriman) have been working on that alleviates the need for invasive plastic surgery and instead, with one injection, encourages DNA to rearrange itself so that cells achieve their top potential.  Hoping to gain an edge, and having see successful results on a test animal, she injects some into herself.  Unfortunately, a little comes out of the end of the syringe and lands on a passing spider as well.

Cassie's hopes come true when the next morning she wakes up, no longer myopic, with clear skin and perfect coordination.  She aces the degrading challenges Brittany sets for her and the other pledges and assures herself a place on the squad after Tiffany (Anne McDaniels) twists her ankle when attacked by the spider, which has now grown big enough to fill an entire bathroom stall.  At this time Cassie starts to grow as well and attempts to pass it off as a genetic growth spurt - that is, until they need an entire gymnasium to hold her.  While Kyle works on an antidote, evil pharmaceutical manufacturer Dr. Grey (Treat Williams), who made a deal with their professor Dr. Higgs (Ted Raimi) for the drug, decides to capture Cassie and take her away for study.

Also, Brittany has decided she has had enough of playing second best and attempts to seduce Kyle who, in self defense, stabs Brittany in the breasts with two syringes filled with the drug, causing her to grow at a faster rate than Cassie.  Escaping from Dr. Grey, Cassie decides she must save the university from a rampaging Brittany, resulting in a showdown on the football field.

Since this is a Roger Corman production I expected a few more horror elements.  We do have a giant spider and much of the same basic plot as Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, but this is 100 per cent played for comedy (and breasts) this time around.  I was hoping for squashed bodies and over the top dismemberment along with the humor.  Still, the movie is campy and enjoyable in its own way.


There are some distracting elements, however.  When using forced perspective for Cassie it's usually well done, but the digital green screen effects here are awful.  I don't mind that the spider looks silly, but some of the effects showing Cassie's size look like they were still in the preliminary stage and got rushed out before they were finished.  I know it's a low budget, but Corman and the people he hires usually know how to still make a movie look good on a shoestring.  The effects are truly distracting to the point that, at the point where you have two giant topless cheerleaders slapping each other, You keep seeing what looks like the background of an EA Sports game from 1995.

Largely, though, it's great to see Corman still putting out movies, and Attack of the 50 Foot Cheerleader does have a lot of that old time charm to make it worth seeing.  With a little more effort it could have been so much better.

Attack of the 50 Foot Cheerleader (2012)
Time: 83 minutes
Starring: Jena Sims, Sean Young, Treat Williams, Olivia Alexander
Director: Kevin O'Neill

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more