Jamie
Alright, in the Breakin’ portion of the post, I let you know who Brion James was (oh, and Shabba Doo as well). Let’s get into Boogaloo Shrimp himself. Interestingly, his wikipedia page is under his birth name: Michael Chambers. Maybe Boogaloo Shrimp is too silly for a wikipedia page. We actually don’t have any more BMT films to target for him, even as a Friend. He was in a couple of non-qualifying films and then ended up playing a dancer in Dudley Do-Right. We’ve obviously seen Dudley Do-Right starring Academy Award Winner Brendan Fraser. In fact, it had a proper place in BMT Lore (BMTL). Back when we first started doing cycles one of the categories was Kids Films. This made sense. Most of those films are horrible. Unfortunately that was also its downfall. Dudley Do-Right was the straw that broke the camel’s back and we removed that category. Who knew we got some boogaloo there as well.
To recap, Special K is back, Jack! She has been killing it on the dance scene. But she’s so tired of just being one of the chorus line. She takes a break to reflect. During that break her richie rich father (who knew!) insists she finally go to Princeton. But she won’t. Dance is her life. Remembering her days with Ozone and Turbo she returns to find that they are also killing it. They are dancing up a storm at the local community center and the whole neighborhood sings and dances wherever they go. Dope. Meanwhile an eeeeevil land developer is eyeing the community center for a mall or whatever and starts to work the back channels to get it condemned. Kelly and the gang put up a fight and are given thirty days to come up with a boatload of cash. Cash that Kelly’s dad would give her if she went to Princeton. But dancing is her life! They try all kinds of things like car washes and stuff all while Turbo falls in love, Kelly gets an audition for a big show in Paris, and Ozone deals with a jealous ex-GF. This culminates in Turbo getting seriously injured falling down some stairs. Only through the power of dance is he healed and able to join the gang in stopping the bulldozers from knocking down the building. Using the media against the eeeevil land developer, he agrees to let them keep the center if they raise the money for renovations. They put on a big show and in the end Kelly’s father, finally understanding his daughter’s life, makes the final donation to save the say. THE END.
The first film was sweet and actually kind of good despite its faults. This is just pure distilled BMT silliness. The music scenes are nonsense, most notably the hospital scene, which I think is kinda famous for how ridiculous it is. The plot is so derivative that you could mistake it for being ironic. Kelly’s father and the eeevil land developer are caricatures to the point that they might as well have been cartoons or had a monocle or a cigar in their mouths. It is not at all surprising that this is a very notable bad movie and the first one is not. It is kind of everything we want to witness when we choose a BMT film, but few filmmakers are brave enough to deliver it too us. As for Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, hoooo weeee, this brought back some memories. In my mind the boy in it is like Luke Skywalker’s age. From my perspective, as a five year old watching it, he was a big kid. He’s like 9 and the single most annoying character in film history. Literally even the teddy bear Ewoks are shaking their heads being like “get a load of this asshole” when he sticks his hand in a log and almost gets eaten and then complains when they save him. All that being said the effects were pretty great and the big monster alien scary and impressive. I liked it, but boy that kid was annoying.
Hot Take Clam Bake! Kelly takes that job in Paris… obviously. She just won the approval of her father for her dance career. No more annoying “you should go to Princeton” lectures. And let’s be real, Ozone has had two movies to make a real move on Kelly and she hasn’t really been super into it so far. She’s probably dreaming of that French dancer she’s about to meet who she’ll bring back to LA and he’ll be like “Haw haw. What is theees, how do you say, break-king? Baguette. Fromage. Grand Paris. Haw haw. I am French.” Ozone and Turbo will be like can he even dance? And she’ll be like he’s the best ballet dancer in the world. And then they’ll pop lock in front of him and he’ll stick up his nose at them and huffily storm off and then Kelly will be like “you guys embarrassed me!” and that’ll be the end of that. Hot Take Temperature: A hot day on the Seine.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me pop lockings, but then I pop lock up the wall and onto the ceiling and I’m dressed like Michael Jackson (again!)* Let’s go!
The Good? I mean, this movie takes the previous movie and cranks it up to 11. If you liked the last movie, this is just more of that but crazier with a rich v. poor story which is working overtime to make anything make sense. And often the pop locking has never looked better. And of course you cannot forget that the subtitle is the top subtitle ever in the history of film: Electric Boogaloo. It is now, effectively, a joke in itself concerning absurd sequel subtitles.
The Bad? Several moments in the film take the pop locking and bring it to the streetz. By which I mean, random people like mailmen and shit start to break dance in the street as our heroes pass by. Or Turbo commits a crime and then almost dies in a stair mishap and is later cured through the power of dance inside a hospital (where also the power of dance brings someone back to life). Moments like this make you wonder: is this some delusional fever dream we are watching? It is decidedly unreal and in that way, much like Icarus, strays too close to the sun and its delicate pop locking wings are melted.
The BMT? Hell yeah. This is one of the quintessential bad movie cult classics. The first film is arguably a good film. This film though goes too far and becomes bad, but also is supremely weird and entertaining. That is a BMT formula to a T.
I did continue my adventure in New York Times advertising. This time I gave it a slightly larger image and refined the prompt such that it was to look for large full page ads only. Even then it was a little discouraging to realize just how random it was. It was limiting itself to films it seemed after a bit, but whether a bunch of ads would count as “majority” or one large one was different run to run and it took long enough that majority rule rerunning would have been a little too annoying.
Supposedly it gets better it you do structured data, so plausibly an option would be for it to return json as {“timestamp”: timestamp, “percent_advert”: float} to try and force it to only report high probability timestamps … but I’m a little skeptical. The better path would probably be to give it an even bigger set of images, and then hope that that would give it enough clarity to fix the issue. Either that or try to restrict it to pages where 100% of the area is a single film advertisement and thus leave nothing up to chance. Regardless, this is one of the results I got:
There is a Breakin’ 2 advertisement on the page before the The River advertisement, and often the second page would be omitted on repeat runs.
Oh shit, you best belieb we watched The Great Ewok Adventure: The Caravan of Courage. The official title of this television movie depends on where you are looking. The Great Ewok Adventure seems like the most common. First, the son in this film is hilariously bad. So bad that it kind of almost ruins the movie. Second, the daughter character is literally a baby. She was around four years old when they filmed and you can tell, she seems to have trouble even getting through scenes sometimes. But, third, I love them little Ewoks! This movie does its job. By which I mean it sells toys to children and reminds everyone that Star Wars is a children’s property at its core. B, I liked watching this, it was a blast from the past. I will also say I watched Battle for Endor (in which the entire family is unceremoniously massacred), and that one was genuinely better, but that makes sense when you realize they traded up from the most annoying child actor in history to Wilford Brimley. That was just a little extra though, so I won’t give it a grade … but I guess a B+.
Once again, the film is a Setting as a Character (Where?) for Greater Los Angeles. A great MacGuffin (Why?) for the famous community center that needs to be saved. If ever you hear the phrase “to save a community center” used as a punchline as a joke, it is likely a play off of the storyline of Electric Boogaloo. And naturally Worst Twist (How?) for the eeeeevil industrialist and general rich person at the end of the film who has a Heart of Gold and now realizes just what a good community center means for a community. This movie is BMT and also kind of good to boot, but hey, I like pop locking more than most I imagine.
Read all about pop locking maybe in the Quiz. Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 