Spoiled Rotten: Cheerleader Ninjas

by Ace McIntyre
KTSW Other Side Drive

Cheerleader Ninjas is a movie from 2003 that looks like an early 90’s film student project. Directed by Kevin Campbell and a special appearance by Kira Reed, this movie tries to be cheesy tongue-in-cheek fun similar to Toxic Avenger but fails miserably.

It starts as some women called the Catholic Mothers with too Much Time on their Hands watch a PSA about homosexuality on the internet. They then go on to how the internet is perverted and the obvious cause of this is cheerleaders, especially the Happy Valley Hamster cheerleaders.

Ok right of the bat this conclusion foreshadows what coming in the next hour and a half. Blaming the cheerleaders comes out of nowhere and we are supposed to accept it just because “it’s a fun cheesy movie” but really it’s an excuse to have subpar writing. If they found evidence like pictures of scandalous girls in cheerleader uniforms and they immediately blame the local cheerleader squad it would be more believable and have subtle humor how these women attack just about anything without learning the facts, but no they found pictures of Sean Connery, so of course cheerleaders. Also calling them the Catholic Mothers with too Much Time on their Hands shows how subtlety is the main thing these writers want to avoid.

We are then introduced to the Hamsters, the happy Valley cheerleaders with their leader being Angela practicing cheers in front of extras and the computer geeks, led by Maverick who lusts after her. Throughout the movie they assume the geeks are ruining their reputation when in reality it was Stephen, a gay man rejected from the squad and his band of hired Catholic bad chicks to seek revenge.  To defeat the bad chicks they learn from master Joda (yes Joda) the powers of Kung Fu. The plot goes off the deep end after that, there’s a hypnotic program involved and it’s really not worth getting into.

Most of the comedy in this movie falls flat. There are multiple reoccurring jokes throughout the movie, such as the geek who farts when he’s around girls and an announcer who shows up at every fight scene. They aren’t really funny the first time, but to have them show up over and over takes out any humor they could have had, if you tell a joke over and over again to the same person it starts to get odd and tiring because you know what’s coming; it’s just a waste of time.

And some jokes are just disgusting, not really in a crude way (though there are some of those too) but in a hard to get though way. They joke about how gay men only think about of sex to the point of wanting to go to prison and even a hint at being a pedophile. How all Asian languages are the same and even have a scene where even one talks Japanese but in really they are just saying nonsense. These jokes are social commentary of how the majority of society views gay and Asian people, but they are played straight like in an “its funny cause its true sort of way” and there not funny it’s just mean-spirited and wrong.

There’s also self-referential humor such as complaining flashbacks, looking into the camera and talking about product placement of porn sites. Just because you recognize something is happening doesn’t make it funny, in fact most of the time these kind of jokes slow down the action in the movie. The best kind of comedy is the kind that still relevant to the plot and flows with the movie, if you have to stop what’s happening to make a joke, it’s not comedic writing, it’s just amateur.

This is why the ninja montage is actually funny, because there jokes about how un coordinated the cheerleaders are in the scene without dragging in it out. None of the jokes here out-stay their welcome and there’s still a progressing of skill going on. If the rest of the movie was like this it’ll be great, but that’s not the case.

The audio in this movie is horrendous, audio cuts in and out, you can hear the wind and cars which makes this film seem like a school project. Yes its low-budget but even the low-budget classic films have competent sound design. It’s not like this movie spend that money somewhere else, the actors aren’t professional and the sets seem to be the local park and the producer’s basement and shed. There’s also really awful sound effects in this movie, like cow noises, different fart sounds, and a studio audience applause and laugh track. These are just awful and pull you out of any immersion that you might have had and make the movie sound incredibly cheap like they had the resources but didn’t put in the effort to give this movie polish.

And yes there’s a lot of nudity in this movie, mostly in the form of geeky fantasies with Kira Reed, but there’s also scenes where the girls just have their shirts taken off for a few seconds and take up the whole frame. These scenes aren’t sexy or funny, they come out of nowhere, they don’t have a purpose, and happen way too often. They’re just used to pad out the movie and that’s about it. It’s embarrassing that these writers wrote these in just because it’s a cheerleader movie and they think it’s a standard to have them in it, when that isn’t the case. And this is 2003, they should know better. There’s porn out there with better written set ups to nudity then this movie has.

The big reveal at the end is that Angela is going to college to be a Computer Science major and after flashing the geeks for some reason, uses her skills to save the world, which was just unplugging the computer before it finished uploading. It can’t get better than that.

This movie is pure garbage, but there are much better low- budget comedies out there.