In the fictional town of It Had To Be, Indiana, Blue Grange (Tab Hunter) dominates the field, scoring the winning touchdown for It Had To Be University in the 1963 National Championship game. After the celebration, a shunned cheerleader named Bambi (Candice Azzara) is shown fawning over Grange’s locker, while the campus buzzes with the news of a shocking murder spree. As the cleanup wraps up, a group of five cheerleaders are gruesomely slain with a spear-like javelin, a chilling start to a wave of brutal acts that also includes an incident with exploding pom-poms. The violence grabs headlines and forces the college’s summer cheerleading camp to shut down. Jumping to 1982, the camp reopens with Bambi back as the instructor, and she meets Pepe (David L. Lander) and his mother Salt (Izabella Telezynska), who warn that the place is cursed and death lingers in the air, though Bambi remains determined to proceed.
At a bus station, Candy, Carol Kane in the role of Candy, prepares to board a bus to the camp, but her religiously strict mother tries to stop her. In the moment of conflict, red beams shoot from Candy’s eyes, lifting her mother into the air as Candy pleads that she only wants to be normal and then heads off toward her journey. Elsewhere, a male cheerleader named Glenn Dandy (Judge Reinhold) says goodbye to his eccentric family before heading to the campus for training. Mandy (Teri Landrum) is introduced in a beauty-pageant-style spotlight, revealing a fixation on dental hygiene. Sandy (Debralee Scott) asks for directions to the camp from a food truck and hopes to hitch a ride, insisting on getting references from every driver she meets. She eventually accepts a lift from then-president Ronald Reagan, while Andy (Miles Chapin) and Randy (Marc McClure), two lecherous male cheerleaders, are shown smoking marijuana on their way to the camp. The cheerleaders arrive and are greeted by Bambi.
Canadian Mountie Sgt. Reginald Cooper (Tom Smothers) phones the warden to share concerns about the new camp and learns of an escaped convict named Jarrett who murdered his own family and turned them into furniture. Cooper heads to the Indiana State Asylum with his sharp-taced assistant Johnson (Paul Reubens), hoping to trace the escapee Fletcher. At Lover’s Lane, a cemetery-museum, they stumble upon disturbing evidence and confront Jarrett, who seems to be connected to Dr. Fuller (Gary Allen) in a worse-than-expected scheme to create and sell furniture made from human remains. The plot thickens when Dr. Fuller and Jarrett deny harming any cheerleaders, and a dramatic turn arrives when Fletcher unexpectedly rises and, with a hand drill in hand, rams it into Jarrett’s mechanical arm and electrocutes both men along with Dr. Fuller.
But the killings don’t stop. Bambi is murdered while bathing in milk and cookies, and a lurid sequence follows where Randy, Andy, and Sandy fall victim after a game of strip poker. Candy discovers the grisly corpses and, pursued by the killer through the dorms, escapes to the locker room. The killer’s identity is revealed: Blue Grange, the star quarterback who longed to be a cheerleader and descended into murder out of deep-seated anger. In a final confrontation on the football field, Candy uses her eye-beams to drive Grange into a giant statue of himself, ending his deadly spree. The detective work is resolved as Cooper arrives, and, with Candy saved, he escorts her away on his horse, Bob, and they ride off into a hopeful future together.
