Pep Squad (USA, 1998)

(Trailer.) The excellent and badly overlooked debut film from Steve Balderson, a writer and director auteur filmmaker with a twisted vision and sharp tongue whose later film Firecracker (2005/trailer) got a bit more positive attention but is likewise equally unjustly overlooked. The fact that so much of the little attention that Pep Squad has received to date has been negative has far less to do with the quality of the film than with the its false marketing. For a long time it was presented as I've Been Watching You 2: Prom Night, as if it were a sequel to some lame teenager horror film when it is anything but a lame horror film or a knock-off sequel. Anyone that pops this baby into their dvd player expecting some cheap and sleazy second rate teenage body count flick is bound to be disappointed, for Pep Squad is far more a unique, highly stylized and truly evil social satire with artistic pretensions.

Considering that Steve Balderson, born on January 19^th, 1975 in Manhattan (Kansas) attended Cal Arts, the Mecca of intellectually bent US American artists, the artistic pretensions are hardly surprising—but that he actually succeeds at keeping the pretensions and still making an entertaining film is. What a great sense of color! Of composition! Filmic rhythm! Killer cinematography! A gratuitous artsy-farsty "dance" scene with tits! Mortal enemies that dress (and paint their nails) in complimentary colors! Moms freaking out on pharmaceuticals! Alcoholic cheerleaders! Student-molesting principals! High school shoot ups! A mid-American Denny's-imitation with a dress code! Hilarious one-liners and totally dry delivery of dialog that swerves between intelligent, ridiculous, inspired and twisted! How can any warped sole with even the tiniest iota of aesthetic values or the tiniest amount of black humor not find this flick the bee’s knees? Pep Squad uses Middle America high school life as a parable to take this piss out of the contemporary U.S., and does so cruelly, beautifully, violently, blackly, outrageously, hilariously. And bodies fall all along the way.

Cherry (Brooke Balderson, the director’s sister), a girl that probably has steroids for blood cells, wants desperately to be Prom Queen, and when she fails to get the nomination, she decides to permanently dispose of the competition, be it by hit-and-run or with a long-range rifle. Terra (Amy Kelly, described on Apollo Movie Guide as "an actress who seems to think she’s playing Divine"), the mortal enemy of Cherry, did get nominated, but she too is not beyond using any trick in the book to get that crown. Troubled teen Beth (Jennifer Dreiling) and her two new friends Julie (Summer Makovkin) and Scott (Adrian Pujol) end up kidnapping the student-molesting Principal Anderson (Eric Sherman), and before you can say “oops”, he’s dead, too. They pull in Cherry to help dispose of the body, but busy-body Terra is on to everything and blackmails her way to the crown. In the meantime, Cherry is stocking up at the local gun store for the Prom Night coronation...

Watch the flick. If you don't like Pep Squad, then hell, you probably shouldn't even be reading a blog like A Wasted Life...