TV Reviews : 3 Little Words Sum Up ‘Laker Girls’--Dull, Dull, Dull

Watching the mindless CBS movie “Laker Girls” is like spending two hours at a pajama party where everyone has had a lobotomy.

Airing at 9 tonight on Channels 2 and 8, this is a dance routine in futile search of a plot, a spiritual sequel to those two movies about the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders that aired in 1979 and 1980. Instead of professional football, the venue this time is the Forum, where the leggy Laker Girls dance before games and at halftime.

You get the feeling that Robert Hamilton jotted down his script on a popcorn box during a 20-second timeout. His heroines are three young women who pin their hopes on making the Laker Girls squad. There’s Tracy (Tina Yothers), who travels all the way from the Midwest. There’s Heidi (Alexandra Paul), an heiress who calls herself Jenny because she wants to be loved for herself, not for her money. There’s Margot (Paris Vaughan), who teaches dance at a Watts community center.

They move in together, they audition together (the tryout includes answering such questions as, “Tell me who your favorite Laker is and why”), they get the results together.

Only two will make the squad, and director Bruce Seth Green creates unbearable suspense in building toward that incredible moment when, at long last, we hear those magic words: “All right, Laker Girls, huddle up!”

Except for Yothers, who has a nice, offbeat quality, and Jean Simmons, who must have won the role of Heidi/Jenny’s grandmother as a booby prize, no one here can even act, so if nothing else, the cast and story are pretty well matched.

There’s ample flesh here for oglers, but the steep price for girlwatching is having to endure a dull movie about dull people doing dull things.