Bring it on deadly!

Cindy Braverman (Grace Patterson) and Allison Regan (Marisa Lynae Hampton) are both hoping to become the newest members of the Queen Bees, the senior cheerleaders!  However, the head cheerleader — Fiona Sparks (Anna Belle Bayley) — isn’t going to make things easy for them or anyone else who wants to become a Queen Bee.  Before you can be a Queen Bee, you have to go through two weeks of ritual humiliation and soul-destroying abuse.

That’s right …. it’s initiation time!

However, this isn’t a typical initiation.  Sure, there’s the usual stuff, like getting soaked with a hose and being ordered to only say “buzz” for an entire day.  But then there’s the secret parties, the forced marches, the mysterious car theft, the disappearances, and the murders.  Oh yes, there are a few deaths.  Actually, everyone insists that the deaths are just an unfortunate coincidence but Allison isn’t so sure and eventually, Cindy comes to share her suspicions.  Can they solve the mystery of the dying and vanishing cheerleaders or is the high school going to have to suffer through a year without their bees!?

Buzz  buzz!

I always enjoy a good Lifetime cheerleader movie, largely because they give me a chance to play “What if?”  My sister was cheerleader and I spent my first two years of high school being continually told that I should be a cheerleader.  I have to admit that I was perhaps a bit more tempted than I was willing to acknowledge at the time.  However, in the end, I always decided that I wanted to establish my own identity and do my own thing and that’s what I did.  I enjoyed high school and I have to admit that I’ve never been able to relate to people who claim that it was the worst time of their lives.  Still, I do occasionally wonder what my high school experience would have been like if I had followed in my sister’s footsteps and cheered.  Would I have still discovered my love of history, art, and writing?  Would I have been lucky enough to still have the same large group of very different and very interesting friends?  Or would I have spent all of my time just hanging out with the other cheerleaders?  (For the record, my sister was a kickass cheerleader and is now a kickass photographer so it probably wasn’t quite the binary choice that it’s often presented as being.)  I imagine I would have a good time regardless of which choice I made because I always manage to have a good time.  But, as a cheerleader, I would have missed out on some fun experiences just as I probably missed out on a few by not being a cheerleader.

Or, at least, that’s what I believed before I watched my first Lifetime cheerleader film!  Seriously, on Lifetime, cheerleading is dangerous!  You’re always either getting stalked or the other cheerleaders are plotting to kill you or you end up with a teacher trying to ruin your life for no good reason.  That’s the fun of a good Lifetime movie, of course.  Everything and everyone always ends up going to extremes.  Lifetime films deal with real-life situations but they do so in such an over-the-top way that you can watch them and think, “I may be struggling right now but at least my situation isn’t as bad as all that!”

Cheer For Your Life is a fun Lifetime cheerleader film, one that assures us that peer pressure is bad but being a cheerleader is really cool.  While it hits all of the expected Lifetime cheerleader film plot points, it also features two likable performances from Grace Patterson and especially Marisa Lynae Hampton.  (If you don’t cheer a little when Hampton continues her investigate despite being on crutches, I have to wonder what you would cheer for.)  Anna Belle Bayley is wonderfully villainous as the head cheerleader.  It’s an entertaining film, one that encourages you to be careful what you wish for while also assuring you that you should probably go ahead and wish for it anyways.