Sometimes, even The A.V. Club isn't impervious to the sexy allure of ostensible cultural garbage. Which is why there's I Watched This On Purpose, our feature exploring the impulse to spend time with trashy-looking yet in some way irresistible entertainments, playing the long odds in hopes of a real reward. And a good time.
Cultural infamy: 1984's Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo contributed precisely one thing to the cultural zeitgeist that the far more successful Breakin' hadn't already provided: a zingy subtitle that could be added to the end of virtually any sequel. To this day, children of the '80s still frequently reference, say, Saw 2: Electric Boogaloo or The Hills Have Eyes 2: Electric Boogaloo, largely because of the built-in catchy rhyme and sheer silliness value. The gag comes up routinely and randomly, via sources from Mr. Show to Family Guy. In a recent online chat with Lord Of The Rings fans, Guillermo Del Toro even joked that H2: Electric Boogaloo had been rejected as a possible title for the planned second Hobbit movie.
To the degree that Breakin' 2 is remembered for any reason other than the title, it's as a quickie flop sequel that trotted out the cast of 1984's Breakin' for another, bigger go-round the same year, quite possibly exhausting both the surprising profits and the minimal goodwill earned by the earlier movie.
Curiosity factor: Largely ironic. Recently, I helped put together a couple of viewing parties for a departing friend, under the heading "WTF Musicals"; the idea was to watch a series of generally baffling but entertaining musical features back-to-back, and revel in the cheese. (Also on the program: The Forbidden Zone, The Apple, Happiness Of The Katakuris, Romance And Cigarettes, and more.) Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo was the opener, and was largely on the roster because few of us had ever seen it, in spite of the running-joke title.
The viewing experience: Much to our surprise, Breakin' 2 turned out to be pure, laugh-a-minute cheeseball entertainment. Granted, it's utterly terrible, with stiff, amateurish acting, enough vivid Day-Glo to blind an army of sunglasses-wearing Corey Harts, and the thinnest and hoariest of thin, hoary old plots. But the camp value is through the roof, from the hilariously awful Pat Benatar streetwear to the monumentally clumsy writing to the completely random mime. Why a mime in a movie about breakdancing? Why the hell not?
Okay, so get this: There are a bunch of friendly poor mixed ethnic types in San Francisco who revamp the local community center and make it a place where all the street kids can just hang out and get along together, taking classes in breakdancing and otherwise being cool together. But then an evil rich white guy comes along and wants to tear it down to build a shopping mall. So they have to put on a show to earn money to save their clubhouse.
Pop quiz: Was that the plot of Breakin' 2, or of a random episode of Little Rascals? (Not to mention 1964's Bikini Beach, or the string of Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musicals before that.) "Hey, kids, let's put on a show to earn the money for our pet project!" has become a cinematic cliché right up there with the snobs-vs.-slobs face-off and the family man who tragically loses his family and turns into a lean, mean killing machine. Breakin' 2 does precisely nothing new with the genre, but that's part of its camp value: The filmmakers know they're doing something corny, dumb, and overplayed, and they just don't care. Like every other "Let's put on a show!" musical, Breakin' 2 isn't remotely about the plotline, it's about the excuse to sing, dance, and, um, don clown makeup and do the moonwalk.
In a nutshell, Breakin' is about rich white girl Kelly (Lucinda Dickey) who lives for dance, but can't quite get that audition-winning edge until she meets a couple of breakdancers: a black kid known as Turbo (Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers) and a Puerto Rican man called Ozone (Adolfo "Shabba-Doo" Quinones). As she picks up on their fly moves and gains her own breakdancer nickname, "Special K," Kelly and Ozone fall in extremely chaste, star-crossed love, retelling West Side Story, but with the races reversed, and without anyone dying at the end.
Breakin' 2 reunites the principals in a desultory "let's just get to the dancing" of way. It starts with an all-dance credit sequence in which various extras demonstrate their popping, locking, flaring, and windmilling moves, culminating with a sweaty Ozone (who makes disconcerting eye contact with the camera, further making the credits seem like something out of an '80s sitcom) and a seemingly distracted Turbo pulling a few moves. Then we see what's happened to Kelly. Having mastered all the hot, marketable street moves and aced her dance audition in movie #1, she's gotten exactly the role that most classically trained dancers aspire to their whole lives: Feather-Assed Chorus Girl #15 in some generic stage show:
Deciding that maybe pro dancing isn't as glamorous as it seems, she heads back to her parents' gigantic mansion for some awkward exposition and some grade-school-worthy sulking:
(It's pretty typical of the film's apathy toward anything but the big dance picture that the upper-crust folks, with their Capitol Building marble home and their giant pool, apparently consider Smirnoff a classy drink. But that's beside the point.)
In spite of the lead interracial couple, the Breakin' movies steer clear of actual interracial action—Kelly and Ozone had a love scene in the first film, but it was axed pre-release, and both the films now just feature a brief peck to indicate that the white girl and the brown boy are supposed to be knockin' boots. Similarly, the films steer clear of overt racial conflict. When Kelly's Stepford Wife mom brightly tells her husband, "Well, at least she's not spending time with those street people any more, darling!" it's just as likely that she means "those pathetically non-pool-owning lower-class people" or "those boys who wear Day-Glo leg warmers and headbands in hideously clashing colors" as that she means "the coloreds." Similarly, while the whole film is about a rich honky and a mincing Jewish stereotype picking on a bunch of poor but good-hearted multi-ethnic ghetto kids, no one ever mentions the race thing. It's entertaining to watch the film tiptoe around the obvious, while trying not to be controversial or confrontational.
Back to the story. Kelly pouts around the house until she sees a picture of herself with Turbo and Ozone—prominently displayed, even though her parents hate them—and smiles nostalgically over it. Having suddenly remembered that her boyfriend exists, she heads off to see him. When Ozone gets the heads-up that she's on her way, he and Turbo throw away some bags of garbage, leading Turbo to mock him for cleaning up for a girl: "The mere sound of Kelly's voice on the phone drives the funk from your dingy socks away," he chants. When Kelly arrives in her flashy car, they tell her about their new community center, Miracles, and offer to show her the place, and a spontaneous dance number breaks out, as the whole neighborhood joins together to rap, break, and boogaloo Kelly on down to Miracles:
Yes, in the ghetto, even the mailman, the traffic cops, and the, uh, green-clad explorers in safari hats all respond to a good beat. As the sequence continues interminably, so do a bunch of well-dressed old-lady missionary types and some joggers. This is how most of Breakin' 2's dance numbers go—they're spontaneous within the story, but they're obviously as rigidly, methodically choreographed as the big show-stoppers from an old MGM musical, leaving the breakdancers feeling stiff and regimented most of the time.
Eventually, the dancers fetch up in a city park, where Turbo lays eyes on a hot Mexican chica who looks maybe 14 years old and speaks no English; her baffled Spanish responses to his behavior will be a running joke throughout the film. Finally, though, they all arrive at Miracles, where Ozone turns the tour over to a mime mysteriously named Magician:
No, he does not perform any magic in this movie. In fact, while he's almost always lurking in the background or appearing in reaction shots, he doesn't even do that much miming. He's probably a child molester haunting the community center in a guise that lets him disguise himself with face paint, give everyone a fake name, and never speak. He seems to be sort of symbolic of Miracle's goofy, inclusive attitude, which makes it feel more like a hippie commune than an inner-city community center. The bright colors don't help much either.
After a lengthy, funky musical tour sequence, Kelly meets the film's token non-evil adult, Byron, who's apparently responsible for transforming a dumpy, underfunded community center into a graffiti-covered, eye-hurting monstrosity. More spontaneous breakin' breaks out, while outside, evil developer Mr. Douglas and his henchmen lurk and dream their shopping-mall dreams. The action then heads back to Evil Headquarters for more clumsy exposition, as Douglas shows his callousness toward those wacky dancing kids:
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