Fun facts: The Majorettes (1986) was written by the cowriter of George Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead (1968) and directed by the actor who played the cemetery zombie in that same film. A nice pedigree that surely must bode well for The Majorettes, right? Well, ah, not quite. No, those trivia nuggets mean diddly squat here because The Majorettes commits the highest crime any B-movie can commit: it’s boring.
It’s also a mess, with too many unrelated and nonsensical plot lines, none of which really work. The slasher elements could have worked, but instead of focusing on its masked killer hunting and knifing a bunch of teenage Majorettes, the movie inexplicably abandons course and morphs into an absurd action movie. It’s a jarring turn.
When you name your movie The Majorettes, you have a moral imperative to focus on the blue-bathing-suit-clad babes of the title. With their voluminous ‘80s hair, vacant expressions, and rockin’ bodies you could bounce quarters off of—boy, that would be fun, why didn’t they do that??—the Majorettes are deserve to shine, even if shining just means stripping in the locker room so the local peeping Tom can snap pics pics of them before eventually succumbing to the vicious killer’s blade. Thankfully, we do get a decent amount of the girls, including during some truly godawful practice routines that barely resemble dancing.
That’s not to say fans of low-to-no-budget regional horror (The Majorettes was filmed in and around Pittsburgh) won’t find plenty to amuse themselves with here. The various subplots are so random you can’t help but admire the filmmaker’s attempt to stuff everything under the sun into a ninety minute runtime. You want a needy teenage bimbo fretting over her football playing boyfriend going away to a big-time college program because of all the poontang he’s sure to find there? The Majorettes has it!
You want smalltime local drug dealers with a fondness for homemade tank tops and the confederate flag? The Majorettes has it! You want a conniving housekeeper trying to kill her very old and very rich boss because she’s rewritten the old biddy’s will to inherit everything? The Majorettes has it! And there’s more! So much more. This movie is not worth the effort it would take me to write anymore about it, though.
So, not quite a lost gem, but definitely a bizarre, sometimes unintentionally funny relic of the waning days of the slasher era. Unfortunately, I wanted more of the slasher aspect and less of the half-dozen or more inane subplots. Look, let’s be honest, this is the only plot we need:
And how about this for some plot we can get behind in an ‘80s kinda-sorta slasher movie?
Am I right, or am I right?
The Majorettes is streaming on Tubi.
The Starfire Lounge 