Welcome back to 1 out of 5 – Would Recommend, where we continue to pay tribute to the utter insanity that is the production work of Golan and Globus! This week, we investigate the movie with a title so ridiculous it’s still a meme thirty years later: 1985’s Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.
What’s The Plot?
Ozone (Adolfo “Shabba Doo” Quiñones) and Turbo (Michael “Boogaloo Shrimp” Chambers) reunite with their friend, former dance partner, and token white person Kelly (Lucinda Dickey) to save their ‘hood’s community center from evil developers using the power of dance.
This moment makes precisely as much sense in context as it does here.
Who Made This Beautiful Garbage?
Yoram Globus & Menahem Golan produced this movie, a sequel to their 1984 hit Breakin’. Both movies rode a legitimate break dancing craze to some financial success, although this film didn’t make fifty percent of what the first did. What’s impressive is that the movies came out nine months apart, a mind bendingly short turnaround time for sequel. Fortunately, The Canon Group Inc. wasn’t known for letting such minor concerns as “well thought out plans” or “quality filmmaking techniques” get in the way of making a movie.
Five Reasons to See It
- Literally everyone in the utopianly diverse poor urban neighborhood – from the meter maids to the postman to the gardeners to the little old ladies – are break dancers. Except the fat people, though there’s probably a practical reason for that.
- Really, the plot is just an excuse to justify the dancing. Since the cast is comprised of professional dancers, that works just fine…as long as you can deal with a tissue paper thin plot, mediocre acting, and loooong dance scenes.
Or young ladies dressed up vaguely like old ones, as the case may be.
- There’s a gang fight/dance battle in this middle of the flick that makes the Jets and Sharks look like the Grammercy Riffs.
- There’s a fat Hispanic guy in the middle movie who has all of two lines and dances in way that has zero lower body movement whatsover. He’s without a doubt the best character in the entire film, and possibly in the history of cinema.
- “C’mon you guys, let’s turn these fools out.” – Kelly, trying desperately not to sound like a rich white girl from the suburbs and failing miserably.
Recommendation
This movie is silly beyond silly, but is an entertaining bit of fluff. Its bad reputation is well earned and deeply deserved, but it’s fun to watch and doesn’t require your undivided attention, making it good for Saturday afternoon viewing. Plus, it’s the actual movie that launched the enduring “*Movie* 2: Electric Boogaloo” meme, a joke so iconic that the documentary about Golan & Globus borrowed the title – that’s reason enough alone to watch it.
One is forced to wonder at this point if Ice T knows he can say “no” to being in movies.
NEXT WEEK: Lou Ferrigno tries to make the sex and violence schlock peddlers do a family film in 1983’s Hercules.
