Breakin'

Kelly studies jazz dance but her teacher is taking her nowhere. A friend takes her to the beach and introduces her to two people dancing in the street: Ozone and Turbo. They do break dancing and Kelly has never seen it. She joins them. The three begin working together and enter a professional audition where the panel does not know what this dance is. Joel Silberg directs. Lucinda Dickey plays Kelly, Adolfo Quinones plays Ozone and Michael Chambers plays Turbo. It is among the first films to carry break dancing and street culture into mainstream cinema. Several similar films were made the same year and the genre exhausted itself quickly. Most of the dancers are real street dancers and the choreography rests on unstaged movement; those passages are why it is still watched. Turbo's dance with a broom is the best known sequence and was shot with a wire rig. In one of the crowd scenes Jean-Claude Van Damme, then unknown, appears as an extra. The script is very simple and the characters are types; the narrative exists to join the numbers together. Who it is for: anyone curious about eighties dance films and the beginnings of hip hop culture. Who it is not for: the story is weak, the acting is amateur, and everything outside the dancing is filler.