TV REVIEWS : ‘Cheerleader’ Gets Lost in the Telling

The mere existence of “Willing to Kill: The Texas Cheerleader Story” affirms that when you have a juicy crime story to tell, the eyes of Hollywood are upon you.

The ABC movie airs at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42, four months prior to the scheduled arrival of HBO’s movie concerning the same bizarre case about a Channelview, Tex., homemaker accused of soliciting murder so that her 13-year-old daughter could become a high school cheerleader. Well . . . as long as there was a good reason.

If the cheerleadermania behind the alleged crime seems vacuous almost beyond belief, so, too, is this depiction, which does little more than regurgitate what’s already been reported, occasionally detouring only to distort or alter facts. Aside from Lesley Ann Warren’s staunch performance as the overzealous Wanda Holloway, “Willing to Kill” is a clunker.

Holloway’s conviction was thrown out on a technicality. She’s now scheduled to be retried for allegedly seeking the murder of Verna Heath in hopes that the death would deter Heath’s overachieving daughter, Amber, from trying out for the cheerleading squad, thereby giving Holloway’s own daughter, Shanna, a better shot.

Holloway has claimed she wasn’t really serious when she asked her former brother-in-law, Terry Harper, to arrange for the murder of Heath (she originally had mentioned having Amber killed too). Unfortunately for Holloway, Harper made recordings of their talks for police.

As Alan Hines’ script notes, suburban neighbors Holloway and Heath (Tess Harper) have a history, their friendship souring as the jealous, paranoid Holloway smells a conspiracy when Amber (Lauren Woodland) beats out Shanna (Olivia Burnette) for their seventh-grade cheerleading squad. The pompon rivalry--and Holloway’s laser-like envy--grow when the two girls enter high school.

Oddly, the producers did not obtain Holloway’s rights. They did buy those of her former brother-in-law, which may explain the distorted portrayal of the shady Harper (William Forsythe) as smooth and almost heroic, when the facts of the actual case showed otherwise.

In effect, the story ends once Holloway is arrested. Yet “Willing to Kill” creeps on for another 35 minutes anyway, putting viewers through a superfluous trial while somehow also seeking to evoke sympathy (a bit belatedly) for the accused woman it has spent almost 90 minutes depicting as a lethal time bomb.

This is one effort that veteran director David Greene may want to drop from his resume. At one point, when Verna and Amber Heath get into their car, Greene has the mother slide behind the wheel but the daughter inexplicably sit in back, for no apparent reason other than that it sets up a camera shot he wanted. Even more comical, when Terry Harper emerges from his final meeting with Wanda and hands over his audiotape to police, he’s told he “did great.”

“You hear it all?” he asks. “Yeah,” a cop replies. But how is that possible when the police weren’t listening in and Harper is just giving them the tape?

Clearly, this is no movie to cheer about.