This movie seems to combine the 70's drive-in fascination with the Patty Hearst kidnapping with its fascination for sexy cheerleaders. Three squads of cheerleaders are on their way to a competition and for some reason are sharing a single school bus (even though one is a tough, inner-city squad and another is from an elite private school) when they are all kidnapped and held for ransom by a group of ex-jocks who call themselves the National American Liberation Army. There's the usual sexploitation filler--the captors and the cheerleaders kill time by having a topless beauty contest, lead Kristine DeBell has (offscreen) sex with the good guy kidnapper,and the lone female kidnapper (who is of course a lesbian) seduces one of the other girls in a bathtub. Finally, the three teams ban together to fight back, which mainly involves a long, gratuitous scene where they all strip off their underwear and fashion it into a rope which they use to trip one of the kidnappers. (Someone could have just stuck her foot out, but where's the fun in that?)
This movie is surprisingly politically incorrect. The black kidnapper is the bad guy while the handsome white kidnapper turns out to be a sympathetic good guy. Still it's refreshing to actually see a black villain for a change and he's the best actor in the movie next to Kristine DeBell. DeBell, of course, was the talented and appealing actress whose career was ruined when it was found out that she had earlier appeared in a porno movie (strangely, a similar thing happened to untalented boob-job Michelle Bauer, but that didn't stop her from going on to appear in 500 low-budget movies that were even worse than her early porno efforts--go figure). This is neither the best of the cheerleader movies (try "The Swinging Cheerleaders", "The Pom-Pom Girls", or "Satan's Cheerleaders")nor the best of the Patty Hearst/kidnapping movies (try "The Candy Snatchers", "Sweet Sugar" or "Abduction"), but if you like mixing your poisons, by all means, check it out.
