Cheerleader Ninjas (2002)

Lionsgate Films. The thing about Lionsgate is that they seem to pick up any movie that nobody else wants to. Sometimes this allows great movies that otherwise wouldn't have had a chance of being distributed a chance, like the original Saw, The Descent, or Crank, which is awesome. But then we have all the movies that other studios passed on for good reason, like Alone in the Dark, See No Evil, Saw 2 – 6 and, apparently, Cheerleader Ninjas. Directed, written, edited, co- produced, narrated, and starring (as “Dog-humping boy”) Kevin Campbell.

All right, let's pop Cheerleader Ninjas in the old video machine. I hope you like fart noises and stereotypes!

We begin with a PSA about how porn makes you gay. A kid gets pulled into his computer by a green monster hand and a guy who introduces himself as the “narrator” says something about how homosexuals should have the letter “H” tattooed on themselves so people can identify them. All right. The camera pulls out to reveal that this is a video being watched by a club at a Catholic high school called “Catholic Mothers with Too Much Time on their Hands,” which is a strange name for a group because it's insulting towards themselves.

So this club has only four people in it, and only one is actually important to the plot, that lady in the picture there. They talk about how the cheerleaders at another, non-Catholic high school are evil because they have a porn site, which she brandishes a flyer for. I should also mention, not because it has any bearing on the plot, that one of the Catholic mothers is pregnant and her water breaks during the meeting. This mother's name is Madonna. A biblical metaphor? I just got a film student boner.

CUT TO! Cheerleader practice. These are the good cheerleaders, they're called the Hamsters. Watching the cheerleaders practice from the bleachers are the school nerds. At least, I'm pretty sure they're the nerds, it's pretty subtle but I think the message is there. A few of them have laptop computers, so that's pretty nerdy, right? Oh, and they're all wearing Star Trek uniforms, so I guess that's a little hint. The only other tool Campbell has given us to identify this stereotype is a sign in front of them reading “geeks, dorks, walking pustules of filth.” A pustule is a small amount of pus, for those of you who don't sit behind this sign. Anyway, the nerds are filming the cheerleaders and then they say, “Come on, back to the clubhouse! We've got subscribers you know!”

After cheer practice, the Hamsters stumble upon a flyer for a porn site- starring them! Apparently this is news to them, and they decide it must be the nerd's fault, leading to this delightful exchange:

Angela (the smart one): I'm gonna kill those worms!
Cheerleader 2: Ugh! I hate worms!
Cheerleader 3: Yeah! They remind me of... worms!

Hahaha! It's funny because they're stupid.

Now we're at the Blessed Virgin Sacrifice Reform School for Girls, where gay teacher Stephen is beginning a lecture called “How to run a death camp for cheerleaders.” Suddenly, in walks the Catholic Mothers from the first scene! The head Catholic mother offers him the chance to kill the Hamster cheerleaders because he hates them so much. There's an elaborate flashback revealing the reason for his hatred of the Hamsters: last year he tried out to be on the squad but was denied because he's gay (I would have thought a better reason for denying him is the fact that he's around forty years old, but eh, whatever). And so, the plot moves forward: Stephen's off to murder the Hamsters.

Meanwhile, the cheerleaders confront the nerds in their nerd-den. Angela grabs the nerd leader, Maverick, by the throat a la Darth Vader.

Angela: Maverick! I thought I smelled your foul stench when I was brought aboard.
Maverick: (gasping for breath) We're- on- a- dip-lomatic- mission...
Angela: I think you're on an E-mission, 24 hours a day! (throws Maverick into chair).

Get it? Stench, emission? Because nerds smell bad, you see.

Some pointless sci-fi references and farting noises later, the nerds reveal that they weren't the ones who made the flyers (“I really didn't make the poster! I would have made her boobs bigger.”).

At school the next day, the Hamsters run into Stephen's ninja cheerleader squad. The film's first terrible fight scene ensues. Here are some complaints I have about it:

-The line “Ninja formation! Wait, we don't even know Kung Fu!” Because Kung Fu and Ninjitsu are the same thing.
-A pretty obvious dummy (actually an inflatable sex doll) is used as a stunt double. It just looks retarded.
-The editing makes no sense, it's a three on four fight, but with the quick cuts it ends up feeling much larger. There's a lot of shirts ripping and the exposed breasts of several obvious body doubles, but when the fight's over all girls are fully clothed and back to normal. Huh. Weird.
-The nerds are there, taking pictures and videos of the topless cheerleaders, which is strange because they just explained that they haven't been taking naked pictures of the cheerleaders
-The sound effects guy is going fucking nuts. There's fart sound effects where it doesn't make sense, cats meowing (I guess because it's a “catfight”), sword slashing when no swords are being slashed, and more. Sound effects are strange and unnecessary throughout the movie, but they're particularly bad in this scene.

After the fight it's back to the nerd den, because “we need to learn some Kung Fu! Last time we were here Maverick was working on a web page for a Ninja master!” The nerds agree to give them ninja lessons from some long haired hippie “Ninja master”. At some point during this encounter, there is a bizarre homage to the scene in American Beauty when Kevin Spacey is watching some high school cheerleaders when he begins fantasizing about one of them. In his fantasy, she rips open her uniform and rose petals fly out. In the Cheerleader Ninja homage, one of the nerds is fantasizing about watching a cheerleader, and when she opens her uniform, a fat retarded guy throws a bouquet of roses at her and laughs. I'm sure Sam Mendes wrote Campbell to thank him for this sequence.

Stephen goes and meets up with a badass black dude known only as “X” who is, I think, the head bad guy. You can tell he's badass as shit because he's literally smoking an entire pack of cigarettes at once, also because he's big and black.

X gives Stephen a folder that has secret information about Angela, only to be opened in an emergency, which doesn't really make any sense but I guess it moves the plot along somewhat.

Now, Stephen's evil cheerleaders confront the nerds and invite them to a slumber party to which they accept. Writer/Director Kevin Campbell, obviously from the “show them don't tell them” school of storytelling, is trying to make us hate the evil cheerleaders for being depraved. When the nerds show up, all the evil cheerleaders are looking at porn. Then, the head evil cheerleader emerges from the bathroom and proclaims “Hey girls, check out what just came out of my butt!” The other cheerleaders, excited beyond belief about looking into a toilet, run into the bathroom to examine it. One proclaims with glee, “Jesus, girl, what did you eat? A truck?”

Meanwhile, there's a training montage with the Hamsters learning to be Ninjas. At one point a cheerleader throws a ninja sword and it hits a bear standing behind a sign that says “Very Rare Bear.” This is my favourite part of the movie. I especially love that it rhymes, and that the word “very” was included. Anyway, the point is that now the girls know Kung Fu and are therefore Ninjas. Right.

Once their training is done, the cheerleaders somehow run into Stephen, the evil gay guy, sitting on a pile of rocks in a field, stroking a puppy. Director Kevin Campbell interrupts and announces, “For the benefit of those watching at home, the following scene will be in 'nese': Chinese, Japanese... and Pekingese!” I guess Pekingese was the punchline? I've learned that I don't understand most of Campbell's jokes.

For the next three lines, characters say things like “Toyota Nissan Honda Suzuki!” and the subtitles say things like “On my planet, overpopulation is a serious problem!” It's all very hilarious and cutting edge. Then people start talking in English again, and the subtitles say things like “Suk mi chu mi likety lesbo goo cu bu fu,” which is the language that I imagine Kevin Campbell's thoughts to be in. Then everything's back to normal.

Evil cheerleaders show up, and here we go with another stupid fight sequence. ALL of my complaints about the first fight scene apply to this one as well, with one addition. This one ends with all the cheerleaders, good and bad, getting on pogo sticks and hopping after each other through a sprinkler. If that sounds at all erotic to you, have faith that this movie can make it look stupid and gross and keep the image untainted in your imagination.

So they chase off the bad guys and it almost seems like the movie's completely over. The nerds and the Hamsters go back to the nerd den and party down, drinking William Shatner Brand beer and William Shatner brand chips. Beer, Chips, Star Trek, and Cheerleaders- a nerd's dream come true! There's some little plot about Maverick tricking Angela into going on a blind date picnic with him but it's confusing as hell and I hardly care at this point, so forget about it.

Maverick and Angela realize that somebody's hacked the internet and there's a “zombie enslavement program” turning all nerds (which means anybody that uses the internet in this movie) into zombies. They hurry back to the party to warn the other nerds and Hamsters. The bad guys, who were the ones that planned this whole thing, realize that the nerds and cheerleaders found out about them and... anyway, something happens and here we go with another fight sequence.

-This one starts with Stephen yelling “You better hope your tombstones are on sale!” What?
-The fight starts with new cheerleaders, never before seen in the movie, running up and kicking the Hamsters in the face. Okay, fine. Then there's a cut and the new cheerleaders are gone, never to return. What the fuck?
-A bunch of mascots run out of the woods and they start fighting the Hamsters. Any casual observer will notice that they reused the bear costume.

The nerds, to help the cheerleaders, make their own plans. “Flamer! Get this over to the nuclear power plant where you work part time in the computer department. Hook your laptop up to the download feed.” Later in the movie, this bit of computer wizardry is going to allow the nerds to make anything they want spontaneously appear. But we'll get to that in a second.

The mascots are defeated, and Stephen mourns their loss.

The original evil cheerleaders show up. They combine to form a “megazord,” just like in Power Rangers. Is that an actual thing? I'd always just assumed that it was just from Power Rangers. Shows all I know. The giant zord, towering over a cardboard city in front of the most obvious green screen you've ever seen, fights off planes, X-Wing fighters, and the USS Enterprise, all of which are created by the nerds from their computer lab on top of a hill. The evil cheerleader zord snaps the Enterprise in half and wipes its ass with it. The nerds make idiotic sc-fi jokes every three seconds. It's unbelievably lame.

Then, the zord crushes the local shoe store (somebody cries, “Ahh! My crippled baby in a wheelchair!” Why would a baby be in a wheelchair? Do you mean a stroller?) and the cheerleaders have had enough. The nerds give them these ribbons to wear arond their necks called “hologram receptors” that will allow them to become a megazord too. This happens. The two megazords are hitting each other with giant double-ended dildos that make farting noises. I would peg this as the lowest point in the entire movie.

Retarded story short, the Hamsters win and the evil cheerleaders fall to the ground dead. Then we see Stephen, and the evil cheerleaders walk up to him. Wait, what? You guys all just died! One shot ago! Ugh. Honestly, whatever. I don't care what happens in this movie now.

Again, the movie FEELS like it's over. They've already killed the bad guys a bunch of times and spent a lot of time celebrating. Somehow, it's not. It keeps going. I guess the zombie virus is still spreading throughout the internet. By the nerds' calculations it will have taken over the entire internet within two days. Some shit goes down and everybody ends up at the head bad guy's hideout, where the movie's two twists come into play.

Twist one: The person responsible for the zombie virus is Todd, a rival computer nerd who I haven't even told you about until now, but if you watch the movie you can call this twist about an hour before the big reveal. The thing about this “twist” is that it changes nothing, the bad guys are still just as bad because they just hired this nerd to help them, so it could just as easily have been any one of the non-surprise bad guys that were responsible for the whole thing. Anyway.

Twist two: We've known throughout the movie that Angela, the smart cheerleader, is going to college on a cheerleading scholarship, we just don't know for what. Well, turns out she's going for computer science! She's a nerd! Wow! Angela uses her nerd skillz to hack the internet and save the day and I can't believe I just wrote “skillz.”

Okay, so they've saved the world enough times now, right? Everything's wrapped up? Not by a long shot. We're in for about sixteen Lord of the Rings- style repeated endings. Two cheerleaders turn out to be lesbians, Stephen joins the squad, Maverick gets a blind girlfriend (he licks her black glasses a lot), and some other stuff. Whatever. This movie sucks and I'm sick of telling you about it.

Numbers out of ten:

Acting: 4
The acting, for a movie that feels a lot like a porno, was surprisingly not completely terrible. Not that it was good, by any stretch of the imagination.
Directing: 2
No. The directing was awful. Props for actually finishing this full length film, and I feel like the director is really proud of it, but it should never be seen. Campbell edited this film as well, which is surprising to me as well because the scenes are shot in a way that I can't imagine they would be by anyone with editing experience. Most of the movie should have been reshot. Actually, now that I think about it, shouldn't have been shot in the first place.
Dialogue: 2
You should already be able to tell from what dialogue I've included here that it's pretty awful.
Plot: 1
The plot was too complicated and incoherent.
Entertainment: 3
Some movies are known for being “so bad they're good”. Not this one. I think it's hard for comedy movies to fall into this category. Failed attempts at drama or horror can be hilarious, but failed attempts at humour are more or less just pathetic. By the time two megazords were fighting with farting dildos over a city I was pretty much done with this movie. I would have turned it off many times but for this review. I would not recommend it to my worst enemy.

TOTAL: 24%

Edit: Out of curiosity I checked RottenTomatoes out on this one. There's only one review, from a site called filmthreat. Anyway, I thought it was interesting because the filmthreat guy apparently LOVED this movie. Some blurbs:

"Sorry if my memory's a little foggy, but there's quite a lot happening in this flick and I was too busy laughing my ass off to give a shit exactly what was going on. All's I know is, director Kevin Campbell is a comic mastermind."

"Yes, my friends, this is the ultimate party movie!"

"Cheerleader Ninjas: it turned my bad mood into giddiness and now I go get naked and play around in a freeway. [What?] That's a good movie for ya!"