The Pom Pom Girls (1976)

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The Pom Pom Girls stands out from the grindhouse pack for me. The title is actually a misnomer, as there are precious few moments with any cheerleaders. The movie is really about two high-school boys and their girlfriends making love, participating in pranks, and enjoying the last year of their lives together before graduation. The only thing driving a conventional plot is a big football game the four characters will be participating in.

Not having much of a plot can ruin many movies, but when it’s done right, it can also be a liberating escape from “the tyranny of narrative” (Steven Soderbergh’s term, not mine). The Pom Pom Girls is a tone poem movie. It captures a feeling, a vibe. It transports you — if you let it — back to youth and free-spiritedness. You can also take it as a teen comedy movie, with the rival football teams’ reciprocal pranks driving most of the laughs. The funniest scene for me, though, is one in which two boys one-up each other in the school cafeteria with one cinema’s most well-mannered food fights.

Director Joseph Ruben (Dreamscape, The Forgotten) distinguishes the film with better camera coverage and placement than most other grindhouse flicks ever have, as well as some exuberant moments of loose, documentary-style shooting and editing. He also casts reasonably good actors that are clearly having a good time living in the moment. The most well known actor in the film is Robert Carradine, who would later become more famous for the Revenge of the Nerds films. James Gammon (Silverado, Major League) appears as the boys’ antagonistic coach.