Hello friends! Do you ever learn a new word, like say, “printanier,” and then suddenly you see that word everywhere? Everyone is making potage printanier, spring soup all over. You know? Sure. I am currently going through this with actress Anna Marie Dobbins, recently seen as the Annoying Wife Who Wears A Pink Fedora That’s, Unbelievably, Important to the Plot in DEADLY MILE HIGH CLUB, and now starring in THE POM POM MURDERS. She’s got a THE WRONG X movie coming out soon, and a DEADLY X, and apparently she was also in a STALKED BY MY DOCTOR that I missed a few years ago. Good for her! Good for you, Anna Marie Dobbins. Let’s see what’s she’s up to in this one, shall we? (Content warnings for murder, stalking, discussion of suicide, and just a really weird idea of what “mania” looks like.)
After a brief title scene introducing you to the concept of “cheerleaders, for basketball,” we get a classic in medias res Lifetime movie opener of a young woman unsuccessfully fleeing a killer. But what’s this? The murdered young woman, who was wearing a cheerleader uniform, is doing a voiceover in an unprecedented breaking of the fourth wall, nattering on about how she knows I’ve seen the minor character get murdered in the first scene before, and they do this to make you watch the movie. Listen here, Little Miss Smartmouth, I have watched hundreds of these openings. I’m hip to the game here too! But she goes on to say that actually, it’s not a minor character getting murdered. It’s her! And she knows it doesn’t look great for her, but actually for a while there things were going swell. And this is how we meet our protagonist, Audrey, played by Anna Marie Dobbins. Hi, Audrey!
Four months ago, Audrey was sprinting to tryouts for the Los Angeles Renegades’ dance team. When she arrives at the back of the line, she meets another dancer, a Black girl with very long braids, who informs her that she is definitely late, and the coach definitely noticed, but she says it in a nice way. This is Tracy, our protagonist’s one assigned friend. Did she have any friends before trying out for the dance team? It doesn’t matter. Tracy is her friend now, and Tracy informs her that she’s unsuccessfully tried out for the team before, and if she doesn’t make it this year she’ll kill someone. Ha ha! We all say things. As they chat, a blonde girl in sunglasses and a plaid puffer jacket saunters to the front of the line like she owns the place, and the coach pops in to tell her that she was on the team last year, not this year, back of the line, Bailey. The way she says “Bailey” makes it sound like a slur.
Anyway, the tryouts happen, and there’s a lot of enthusiastic dancing, and I learn words like “chaînés.” At one point, a star player for the Renegades, Walter James, wanders through the gym. He drops his jersey and Audrey hands it back to him and they smile at each other, until he excuses himself to go talk to Bailey, who does not want to talk to him. She is busy throwing herself at a different superstar basketball player, thank you very much. There’s an interview portion at the end of the tryout, which Audrey stammers her way through, concluding with “go Renegades, yay!” to her and my great embarrassment. My chaînés are worse than hers but my on-camera interview skills are better, so I feel okay about myself.
After the tryouts, Tracy reassures Audrey and they exchange numbers, and then Audrey goes outside to overhear Walter James and Bailey arguing and also wait for a rideshare, which will never come because her phone died. Luckily (?) for her, Walter offers her a ride home. She pretends not to know who he is and then points to the giant billboard with his face on it behind him. This is the vibe. On the drive to Audrey’s, she learns that Bailey and Walter dated for about six months and then she broke up with him in the middle of the playoffs, and is pissed off at him for asking her to not immediately start dating one of his teammates. Audrey makes a bunch of drastic assumptions about how much Walter fucks around, because she’s heard of Wilt Chamberlain, and he informs her that actually he is an observant Baháʼí and therefore celibate until marriage. She apologizes for teasing him, and he replies that even if she’s some big time NBA cheerleader, he won’t sleep with her, and I’m surprised they used the phrase “NBA” in here rather than pretending this is some other league. How many basketball teams does Los Angeles need? Isn’t three too many? I’m not a business person. I don’t know. Audrey gives Walter her phone number when they get to her house, because she believes in shooting your shot. (That’s a basketball term, I believe.)
In the morning, Audrey recaps the audition for her mom, who she lives with, and her mom is extremely skeptical of the whole prospect, reminding Audrey and the viewers that cheerleaders are absurdly underpaid ($100 per game!) and overworked, but Audrey says that the real money is in appearance fees and modeling work. Are there a lot of new malls opening that need a Renegade Girl? I hope so. Audrey’s mom thinks she should have gone to law school, but upon hearing about sweetie pie Walter, she agrees to settle for her marrying a nice millionaire. She’s a nurse, so she’s very practical, and she knows that’s where the real real money is.
Then someone goes to Bailey’s apartment and strangles her with a piece of purple fabric, while her weird and nervous dog Archie watches. We look at the dog so long that I start thinking, “is the dog going to do something? Does the dog talk?” but it’s just a regular small dog watching its owner get murdered. It does not talk.
Audrey is doing a morning workout when she gets a call from Tracy, who didn’t make the dance team, and another call from Coach Cassie, telling Audrey that she needs to work on her public speaking but golly gee, she just loved her dancing, so she did make the team. Audrey squeals and jumps on the furniture like a puppy until Walter interrupts the celebration by showing up at the door wanting to congratulate her. I just realized there was literally no reason to have this buildup, because like: obviously she’s on the team? There would be no movie if she wasn’t on the team? They could have just started from this point? It’s fine. I learned those dance words so it was all worth it. Walter takes Audrey to a park, where they pretend to drink from empty coffee cups and look at some ducks. Boy I hope Walter isn’t a murderer, he seems like a nice big basketball boy. They get a swan boat! Murderers can’t do swan boats, the pedals just lock right up if they sense you murdered someone. After the swan boat, Audrey asks if it would violate his religion if they kissed, and Walter says, “oh, well, yeah there’s a petition, and a waiting period, and,” then they smooch. It’s cute but it demonstrates the flagrant disregard for the Baháʼí faith that you see so often in a Lifetime movie.
It’s time for Audrey’s very first practice as a Renegade Girl, and it’s also Tracy’s very first practice as a Renegade Girl, because she made the team after all! There was an opening for some reason. (The reason is that Bailey got murdered while her dog didn’t even say a word.) Tracy and Audrey are so thrilled to see each other that they do a little slapstick thing that ends with Audrey’s energy drink on the floor, and a janitor screams at them for laughing about it instead of immediately getting on the floor and licking it up like a dog. (God, what a horny movie!) Some lady in a suit wanders through the gym and calls off the janitor, and I immediately recognize her as the aunt from AM I A SERIAL KILLER, but most of the people in this scene recognize her as Nora McConnell, executive director of the Renegades and wife of the owner. The owner himself, Michael, also wanders into the gym, and Tracy’s antennae stand at attention. He’s kind of handsome in a rich white guy kind of way. A little craggy. You know. Unfortunately, Michael immediately deflates Tracy’s horny balloon by announcing Bailey’s death to the assembled squad. Coach Cassie comforts a distraught Nora, and Michael asks the dancers to not gossip to the press. Tracy mutters that Bailey sure would have loved this attention, which is a weird thing to say about a person you met a maximum of two times and who was just murdered.
After practice, Audrey and Walter hang out at his house. A grieving Walter wonders who could have killed Bailey; they had their problems and frankly she seemed terrible but he really did love her. Some cops show up at Walter’s house because they have an answer to his question: Walter killed her! He was the last person to be seen with her, and the murder weapon belonged to him. Despite his protests that he was jogging on the beach when she was murdered (“it’s good for his calves,” Walter’s nameless lackey informs us), he’s taken down to the station and charged. Audrey goes home and watches the news with her mom, and we learn that that murder weapon was literally Walter’s Renegades jersey. Also, the murderer left a signed affidavit saying, “yes hello it was me, Walter James, who did the murder, with my shirt, thanks for reading.” Pretty open and shut! Audrey’s mom blames steroids, but Audrey just doesn’t think he’s guilty. People in this movie really get to know each other quickly. They’re like baby birds imprinting on their mothers.
Dance team must go on, and at the next practice, Tracy asks Audrey if Walter seemed like a murderer to her, and Audrey snaps at her that he’s innocent until proven guilty, and how do we know that Tracy didn’t murder Bailey, huh? She did say that she’d kill someone if she didn’t make the squad this year, isn’t that right? Isn’t it?? Tracy loudly proclaims this to be nonsense, and the movie didn’t really spend one second making us think that Tracy might have actually done it, but they’re arguing loudly enough to attract everyone’s attention. As the coach drags Audrey out of the gym, Tracy informs her that actually she was at her acting class when Bailey was murdered. “We did a scene from Streetcar. I was terrible.” God why is that so funny? It’s so funny. In her office, Coach Cassie scolds Audrey for stirring up trouble and tells her that one more outburst and she’s fired, some other girl can make $100 a game and shill for nightclubs or whatever. Also, like, what’s the big deal? Bailey sucked and there were a lot of reasons someone would want to murder her. Living in a Lifetime movie seems very high-pitched. Audrey hits the showers and has a nice long flashback while the janitor, Lou, peeks at her because he’s a creep. Audrey puts on a crocheted bralette, the kind of thing you can wear as a shirt if you’re extremely fit and hot, and leaves, noticing that the janitor has a little shrine to Bailey in his office. That’s a data point, sure.
That date where Audrey and Walter went on the swan boats must have really meant a lot to her, because after he makes bail she heads to his house to quiz him on topics such as: is he on steroids? Did he really choke out his coach one time? Was he mad that Bailey fucked a teammate after they broke up? Walter, who is lifting weights while wearing an ankle monitor, replies: no, no, and not mad enough to kill her, and also why is she here? Is it normal behavior to smooch a very famous dude one time and then show up at his house to ask him if he’s a murderer? Isn’t Walter busy? Doesn’t he have any other friends or hangers-on? A trainer? Agent? Manager? Something? No, just the cheerleader he met like a week ago. This is what it is to be a hot person: you just show up in someone’s life and you’re immediately the center of it. Incredible.
There’s a lot of dance practice in this movie about a dance squad, and the owner’s wife Nora is watching today’s, with fists clenched. I can’t…really tell what’s happening? She is certainly acting very strenuously, leering at the dancers with either bloodlust or regular lust. I really try not to criticize the actors in these movies, who are working people doing their best, but she is…acting, a lot. During a break, Audrey tries to poke some other dancers for information about Bailey but is swiftly dragged outside by Coach Cassie and told to shut her trap. Michael, the team owner, who spends his days wafting about the hallways of his sports complex, shows up and suggests firing Audrey, who should really stop “reminding” everyone about Bailey and Walter. Once someone dies and someone else is arrested for their murder, they stop existing, and talking about them speaks them back into existence and it’s really quite awkward, since Tracy was already given Bailey’s spot on the team. Cassie doesn’t fire Audrey, but she does make her agree to keep quiet at practice.
I don’t know how time works, but now we’re at the McConnells’ house at night, while Nora leaves for the night and Michael hornily watches video introductions of the Renegade Girls (Audrey’s favorite fictional character is Miss Marple and her least favorite food is sushi) and then makes his selection from the menu. When Nora arrives at dance practice (why? also, when? also, where am I?) she sits in the bleachers, staring into the middle distance and murmuring things like, “no, Bailey, no,” and “you can’t be here, you’re not real.” Audrey snaps her out of it, but then Nora just drives home having intense expository flashbacks about confronting her husband over his many, many, many Renegade Mistresses. While she rattles off the names of cheerleaders he’s banged, Bailey peeks around the office’s doorway and records the argument with her phone. Michael wearily tells Nora that she hasn’t wanted to have sex with him in 15 years, and she also refuses to get a divorce, so whatever, and then realizes Bailey has been recording them. He runs after her, and the flashback ends, but there are implications. You know the ones.
When Nora gets home (what time is it), she breathlessly informs her husband that she can’t deal with this anymore, the cheating, the blackmail, Bailey’s murder. While Michael tries to calm her down, Tracy creeps around the master bedroom trying to get dressed because, obviously, she and Michael were in a real flagrante-delicto-ass situation. Nora’s yelling about the EPISODES she’s been HAVING is cut short by Tracy knocking over an occasional table that shouldn’t have been there anyway, rich people have too much furniture, and Nora charges up the stairs to see who her husband’s been banging now. Tracy emerges and says that Michael said they were in an open relationship, and also she didn’t hear anything, ha ha ha, and she wouldn’t say anything if she had, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha? Nora lunges at her, and in the ensuing scuffle Tracy goes over the banister and dies instantly because of course she does. You don’t have a banister like that in your house without thinking of it as a murder weapon. While Nora and Michael try to figure out what to do with the dead woman in their foyer (it is immediately taken as gospel that she is dead, no possibility of reviving her, I don’t want to google “odds of death from 20 foot fall” but you can do that and let me know if you want), Audrey calls Tracy to leave her a message apologizing for sort of accusing her of murder. It’s too late, Audrey! You might as well call your precious Miss Marple!
Very early the next morning, Lou the janitor finds Tracy’s body in the parking lot of the arena. You don’t get sports-team-owner money without knowing how to solve problems, okay? Dance practice starts, again, with the announcement that one of the team members has died a tragic death, this time a suicide, because Tracy “jumped” off the “roof” and we “found” a “suicide” “note.” Anyway here’s a grief counselor, any questions? Uh yeah, says Audrey, like, a lot? How did Tracy get to the roof? Why wasn’t she at practice yesterday? Okay actually they meant questions like, “how can I use this tragedy to make me a better cheerleader?” or “is it okay if I’ve already forgotten about Tracy and what’s-her-name, uh, Bobbi maybe, in my quest to be the best Renegade Girl ever?” so please shut your trap, Audrey. She stops asking questions anyway, because she gets a call from the detective working on Walter’s murder case, and Michael overhears that conversation before going to have a chat with Lou. It’s not so much a chat, actually, as a series of threats and demands and bizarrely sympathetic Lou backstory, filled with allusions to the kind of “problem” Lou used to “take care of” “back in Jersey,” before Michael helped him out and got him clean and helped out his brother. Can I watch that movie instead of this movie? The one about the close relationship between basketball tycoon Michael McConnell and twitchy ex-addict Lou and Lou’s unnamed and nebulous brother? No? Okay. Michael has another problem for Lou to take care of, and then he’ll give Lou more money than he’s ever imagined. He can retire early! To Mexico! But who will clean the arena? Lou seems to be the only janitor.
That night, Nora calls Audrey to ask her to help with a memorial service for Tracy, who surely did not have anyone she was closer to than the coworker she met like two weeks ago and almost immediately had a falling-out with, so Audrey heads back to the arena. She tries to sneak onto the roof Tracy “jumped” from and fails, and then pokes her head into Lou’s closet office. She snaps a photo of his shrine to Bailey, but then Lou catches her snooping. “You killed Bailey,” Audrey says, and Lou replies, “no, I loved her,” but also now he’s strangling Audrey with a rope, so it’s like, none of us are the worst thing we’ve ever done, we all contain multitudes, etc. Before he can finish the job, Nora wanders into the scene and brains Lou with a wrench. Some paramedics show up to tend to Audrey (she’ll be fine), and her mom comes to pick her up. The detective who was investigating Bailey’s murder tells them that Lou had an extensive criminal record back in New Jersey and they’re pretty sure he killed everybody and framed Walter. This is surely the most dastardly enterprise ever undertaken by anyone with a work fridge full of La Croix. And now he’s dead!
In his office, Michael pours himself some brown liquor and muses to Nora that he doesn’t really feel great about framing Lou for murder. Nora points out that he has his star player back, and everyone’s happy, except for the people who are dead, so what’s the big deal? Well, the big deal is that Michael knows Nora killed Bailey, which is much to think about. He also knows she’s off her meds, which is why she’s been having these episodes where she wanders into the gym and has flashbacks of Bailey demanding a million dollars to keep quiet and then also of Bailey getting murdered. Nora thinks Michael should thank her for doing his dirty work, and he’s like, no thanks!! I simply wanted to own a basketball team and bone cheerleaders and this is not what I signed up for here!!
In the morning, Walter comes to visit Audrey, newly freed from his ankle monitor since the charges against him were dropped. She jumps on him like a koala and I think about how I wish I were a tiny cute woman who could do that, and then they get coffee and walk around the park because surely there’s nothing else to do in Los Angeles. Audrey muses about how in the moment before Nora obliterated him with a wrench, Lou actually loosened his grip on her throat. She doesn’t think he was really going to kill her, and she doesn’t think he killed Bailey. Which means the real killer is still out there! Well, according to the internet, there are 25 to 50 (????) serial killers walking around this country at any time, so think about that, Audrey. She doesn’t think about that and instead goes to the arena to poke around Nora’s unlocked, unguarded office, and basically finds a bunch of Evidence that says “I hated Tracy and I’m off my meds!!” Coach Cassie finds Audrey sleuthing around and starts to reprimand her but finally has to admit that you know, these obscenely rich and powerful people sure do seem like they’re up to no good, and the two gals start to hatch a plan.
Would it surprise you to know that this plan is literally straight out of Hamlet? Because it is!! Tracy’s memorial, which is also a press conference, is getting underway, hosted by Nora and Cassie. And what better way to honor the memory of Tracy, ostensibly driven to suicide by the pressure of her brief tenure as a Renegade Girl, than to perform a peppy Renegades dance routine? Out comes the dance squad, in full purple regalia, and I can’t decide if it would be worse if they were in all black. Audrey’s not dancing with them though; she’s lurking by Nora asking her why this bothers her, and why she’s twitching so much. We switch POVs into Nora’s hallucination, drawn out by watching the Renegade Girls. She sees Bailey, Lou, and Tracy, asking her why she did it, and she finally snaps. “Because you’re all a bunch of whores!” Nora screams at the troupe of women performing a high-energy dance routine at a memorial service. She continues yelling, directing most of her ire at a hallucinated Bailey, who is giggling and holding up her phone to record the tirade, and then attacking her. In real life, Audrey’s mom is actually the one recording Nora, because she hadn’t done anything in a while and we might as well put her in this scene, she’s a nice lady. Somebody pulls Nora off Audrey’s mom and Nora runs out of the room. The assembled reporters are like, “??????” because imagine how baffling this would be.
At home, Audrey watches the news report on Michael’s arrest for the cheerleader murders and Nora’s current unknown whereabouts. Why, she could be anywhere! Even lurking outside, while the cop who’s supposed to be keeping an eye on Audrey’s house falls asleep! But you know what this situation calls for? Pom poms. Audrey puts on her Renegades uniform and dances around her room a little bit, because we all react to stress in different ways. Her bopping is interrupted when she hears Nora shoot the cop outside, and then we’re back at the first scene of the movie, where someone comes into Audrey’s house and shoots her mother and then her.
But! Actually! This is Nora’s hallucination, in a kind of 25th Hour scenario where she is imagining a different way for the story to end. This movie needs to stop reminding me of better movies; that’s the cardinal sin of bad movies. In actuality, Nora is standing outside Audrey’s house patiently waiting for the cop to arrest her. As he leads her away, Audrey and her mom come outside, and Nora asks them if they’ve seen Bailey and Tracy, and if they can tell them she’s sorry. Voiceover Audrey apologizes to me, the viewer, for lying at the beginning of the movie. She doesn’t die! She doesn’t get shot! But if I didn’t think she did, I wouldn’t have watched, right? What? What the fuck??? Has the Lifetime movie industrial complex become self-aware? Not in the self-deprecating way, but in the Skynet way? I do not need this. But also I think the movie thinks this is a “twist” when in fact it is a “lie.” You broke the fourth wall to lie to me, Audrey! That isn’t fair!
There’s a button scene at the end where Audrey and Walter are together and she’s still a cheerleader and he’s still a nice basketball boy and she’s also going to go back to school to be a detective but I don’t care! I’m mad that I was snookered! I’m mad that this wasn’t as good as Hamlet or 25th Hour! You invited these comparisons upon yourself, THE POM POM MURDERS, and now you must bear that weight! See you next time, hopefully in less than six weeks (!), and hopefully for something that isn’t a liar.