The Pom Pom Girls is a low-budget slice-of-life comedy about high schoolers plainly inspired by American Graffiti and also an interesting spiritual ancestor to Dazed and Confused.
There really isn't much of a traditional plot. The film mainly follows two guys (Robert Carradine and Michael Mullins) as they live their lives the first few weeks of the school year. They play some football, clash with the coach, drive around, eat hamburgers, have sex, try to build some relationships with girls, exchange pranks with a rival school, and feud with a hapless wanna-be tough guy.
This is not for folks looking for a lot of skin. Writer-director Joseph Ruben seems uninterested in spending a lot of time focused on body parts (I suspect an opening credits scene of girls in bikinis on the beach was demanded by the producer). It makes for a film packaged as a sexploitation comedy (that title!) that is fairly uninterested in sexploitation. The film isn't able to offer much interesting insight into human behavior, and it lacks the performances and richness of Graffiti or Dazed. It is nonetheless interesting for a while as a fun slice-of-life of innocent youth having the times of their lives. The film's inability to develop any kind of interesting through-line eventually takes a toll and there's too much dead space in the middle. Had the performances been more lively or had Ruben been able to raise the stakes a bit more on the shenanigans, this might have become a real gem. As it is, Ruben's direction is solid (featuring a showpiece dolly shot through the student parking lot), suggesting Ruben's rise to studio director in the 80s and 90s. It's a cut above most teen sexploitation movies, if not fully realized.
Screened on DVD.
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