I don't remember how I laid hold of this DVD, but it was nearly two decades ago. It was one of the movies I used to put on my laptop and barely look at while I cross-stitched endlessly in a miserable, unheated room in western Massachusetts. So I've seen it a lot of times.
The director of Satan's Cheerleaders is Greydon Clark, whose bad-movie record is truly astounding. He made jigglefests in the 70s, dumb action and horror movies in the 80s, and even a kids'/sci-fi movie with his own sons in the 90s. The guy has a reasonable sense of humor about himself (I think he's in a Rifftrax/MST Facebook group I belong to), and he evidently has a lot of friends in the business, given the names in some of his films - Tony Curtis and Peter Lawford among them.
I wanted to do a project on 1977 in part because of the movies of that year which I've observed are especially influential in the decades that followed, or with which I have a personal connection: Star Wars, Eraserhead, Death Bed, Hausu, Suspiria, Close Encounters, others. The truth is that Satan's Cheerleaders is on that list. It was by no means influential to anyone, but it mattered to me during the worst year of my life. It was something stupid and incompetent to put on in the background, something that would both distract me via nudity and atrocious jokes and yet would offer a reminder that there were depths to which my life had not sunk.
Anyway. The film itself is a slice of exploitation, full of single entendre and tits. The thirdhand devil stuff is more influenced by Satanic Panic than The Exorcist (for once). Clark also definitely saw Rosemary's Baby, although he didn't retain the same things the rest of us did. It's weirdly edited, shot with pedestrian instincts, written with humor no more sophisticated than a paperback compiling 1,001 dirty jokes, and acted unimpressively, with the exception of Kerry Sherman (now a therapist, and good for her). I think it's a fun-to-watch bad movie, not an unpleasant one, but not everyone who's seen it agrees.
What it has to do with the threads of the larger project: the bad humor, the sex, and the bad humor about sex; the devil theme, more or less; and the hillbillies-turned-bad element, which is not as sophisticated or deliberate as in Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, but is still there.
Satan's Cheerleaders is bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, never meant to be watched carefully or repeatedly, and yet that's exactly what I've done with it. I can't fully explain how it came to pass that this movie looms larger in my mind than all the other junk down on its level. But the fact that this particular bad movie came out in 1977 is, frankly, one of the reasons I decided to study this year at all.
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