One of the countless cheerleader films that captured the minds and tightened the pants of moviegoers in the seventies, Jack Hill's The Swinging Cheerleaders tells the story of a lovely young woman named Kate (Jo Johnstone). She's enrolled as an undergraduate at Mesa University but has more on her mind than just learning and books. Really, she's working undercover for the college newspaper trying to write a report on the school's cheerleading program. The goal here is to expose it for the base exploitation of young women that she knows it really is.

But of course, once Kate joins up with the team, she starts to look at things a little differently. She moves into the dorm to really help sell herself as the real deal, but soon enough she's got a thing going with Buck (Ron Hajek), the captain of the football team. Never mind the fact that her boyfriend is the editor of the paper she's writing for! But Buck's not the nice guy Kate thinks he is. She learns this when he pulls a dirty trick on virginal cheerleader Andrea (Cheryl ‘Rainbeaux‘ Smith). If that didn't make him enough of a bastard, well, Buck was already seriously involved with Mary Ann (Colleen Camp).

When Kate finds out that the coach (Jack Denton) is in cahoots with a local businessman and the college math teacher (Jason Sommers, who himself is hopping into bed with cheerleader Lisa (Roseanne Katon), to rig the football games, she feels the need to blow the whistle on them. But will anyone believe her? Is it possible that…. she's in too deep?

This one definitely has more smarts than your average cheerleader film and, for better or worse, it has a lot less nudity than you'd probably expect too. Hill was clearly reaching for something more here, and at times he achieves it. Some will read a lot into the feminist leanings inherent in the script (co-written by Hill and David Kidd using female pseudonyms (Jane Witherspoon and Betty Conklin), but this seems to be undone in spots (without spoiling it, what happens to Smith's character doesn't exactly propagate the women's' movement). Also contradicting those leanings are some of Kate's own actions. If she's out to expose the exploitation of women should she be encouraging a friend to wear see through clothing to help herself get the guy she wants into bed? You could view that as a woman choosing to do what she wants to get what she wants but it seems more like this was put into the movie not for that reason, but to provide the requisite titillation you expect from a movie with the word ‘cheerleader' in the title!

Pushing politics to the side and judging the movie on its most important quality - that being entertainment value, the movie is pretty successful. As was mentioned, the T&A factor is lower than average here but Hill makes up for that with plenty of nutty dialogue and a really fast moving plot. The movie is light on character development but it's colorful and quirky and it's got some decent humor mixed in that's fairly effective if not always consistent. The movie is also really nicely shot. Yes, it does use stock footage in the football game scenes and fine, the Mesa University set is noticeably limited in size and scope, but the camerawork is solid and the use of color is often times very impressive. On top of that, we get a pretty killer cast. Colleen Camp, Rosanne Katon and Cheryl Smith are all in fine form here, both in terms of the physicality they bring to their respective roles and the quality of their performances. The film also comes to a genuinely unexpected conclusion, one that you probably aren't going to see coming and that always counts for something.

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The Swinging Cheerleaders hits Blu-ray from arrow in a ‘brand new 2K restoration from original film materials' framed at 1.66.1 widescreen. The stock footage inserts of the football games still look like stock footage inserts of football games, that's just the nature of the beast and it can't realistically be helped, but otherwise this is a top notch picture. Detail is very strong and texture is as well. Skin tones look perfect, black levels are nice and solid and there's good depth here too. The disc is free of any obvious compression artifacts and the image shows a nice, natural amount of film grain but very little in the way of actual print damage. This is film like and frequently pretty impressive, particularly when it comes to color reproduction.