After a long hot summer, it's back to school for the students of Rosedale High, where an impending football game against arch rivals Hardin leads to a series of high-spirited pranks carried out by Rosedale's star players Jesse and Johnnie (Michael Mullins and Robert Carradine) and members of the sexy cheer-leading squad, the feisty pom pom shakers including lovely brunette Laurie (Jennifer Ashley) and pretty blonde Sally (Lisa Reeves).

The Pom Pom Girls is a fairly typical slice of 70s teenage drive-in fodder, full of hot girls and hunky guys whose lives mainly revolve around their cars and who they're canoodling with in the back seat. It's clichéd and predictable stuff but achieves a certain lackadaisical charm thanks to an amiable cast and a suitably inconsequential approach to its plot—as the viewer, we have no idea where we're being taken, but we're still happy to go along for the ride.

I have been falling in love with these drive-in movies after I started watching them last year. I picked up the various box sets which included so many Crown International releases featuring the hi-jinx of high school kids, living it up like there's no tomorrow, enjoying their youth before adulthood would rear it's ugly head spoiling the fun forever.

I think "The Pom Pom Girls", which really isn't about cheerleaders despite how the title and opening credits might fool you into thinking so, is just another example of this. It's about kids in their senior year of high school, having a grand old time, making out, guzzling beer(I love the scene where Robert Carradine scores a six-pack from a gas station by appealing to the owner's mercy for not embarrassing him regarding being held back two years! Hey, whatever works!), disrupting class, goofing off in their fast cars, and other such general teenage shenanigans. I was not the kind of teenager who acted so crazy and spontaneous as these kids, so my stimuli is enhanced through the experiences of these characters who weren't thinking about long-term careers or life after high school, and I believe "The Pom Pom Girls" does in fact capture that moment in time where, when we were young, weren't concerned with such things.

I wasn't a 70's teen, but I imagine it must've been mighty fun living during that specific time..to be honest, "The Pom Pom Girls" doesn't have a plot to speak of, really just a series of events leading up to a race of suicidal chicken over a chick between Carradine, who is just a charming, unpredictable, reckless rascal, and Bill Adler who must've been in 20 of these movies in the 70's.

This is the restored R-rated version, featuring some nudity, particularly a locker room undressing where the cheerleader girls are changing. The late Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith has a minor role as, you guessed it, a cheerleader, who has a make-out session with football jock hunk Michael Mullins. A great deal of the movie has Carradine and Adler at each other all the time over Jennifer Ashley, including a food fight and two laughable skirmishes which shows neither is much of a brawler. Mullins and his high school coach, played by James Gammon, are often at each other's throats..neither likes the other and this plays out at the end when the kid slugs his coach, but somehow escapes both unscathed and with the upper hand. While making out numerous times with a pretty blond car hop, Mullins eyes Lisa Reeves, who, of course, at first rejects his advances, soon falling for him as all the other girls usually do that drool over such dudes.

I think I prefer these kinds of movies that are virtually plot-less because that seems to be how teenage life was back then, not quite dwelling on the up and coming future, just concerned for "the here and now." My only real complaint is that Cheryl Smith is treated as an afterthought and doesn't factor in the plot really at all..she could've been the potential love interest for a rejected Adler, so that he could've been granted a reprieve, because, by and large, the guy isn't that bad, he just wasn't very happy with losing his girl(who would be?).