Unforbidden

My last Liveblog was a mediocre 80s film that exploited a pop culture trend. After that, I wanted my next one to be more contemporary and you almost ended up reading about Miley Cyrus in The Last Song but then I noticed something else on Netflix Instant list, something...wonderful. In the late 80s/early 90s, America had a brief flirtation with a certain Latin dance. This sparked a film making and marketing strategy convergence that caused two movies about it to be released in the same week. Sadly, only one of them is available for instant streaming so that's the one I'm doing. Strap yourselves and tighten your sphincters as you prepare to read my real time comments on this movie you've never heard of that stars no one. That movie would be...LAMBADA.

0:00:00 -- Before even beginning, I noticed this line in Netflix' description of the film: "To gain the barrio kids' respect, Kevin demonstrates his dazzling lambada moves on the dance floor." One way or another, good or bad, this shit just got legendary.

0:00:30 -- Wow, only 30 seconds in and it already has signs of massive suckage. It's a Golan/Globus film (no time to explain so Google it if that means nothing to you), a song is playing that sounds like every 80s dance tune ever made, the first line of dialogue was some frat boy yelling, "BREWSKIS," and it was directed by Joel Silber. He directed Breakin', a movie so shitty that Breakin' 2 was actually an improvement. The circle is complete. Moving on.

This mobile phone can call someone who's nearly 2 blocks away if the wind isn't blowing.

0:10:00 -- The movie opens at a party being thrown by wealthy high school douchebags exalting in the privileges that come with being a wealthy high school douchebags. These kids must not be very smart because they all look to be clocking in around age 25 yet they're still in high school but at least they're rich douchebags so they really don't care. The next day, the head of the math department gets sacked for dating a Latino woman (seriously). This provides an opening for Kevin Laird who, I assume, is the "Kevin" mentioned above who will soon be entrancing barrio kids on the lambada floor. I suppose this will be all right so long as he doesn't marry any of them. Meanwhile, a math student named Sandy has an obvious crush on the ridiculously handsome Kevin. Luckily, she's a high school student in her early 20s so at least it's legal. Later, Sandy sees her boyfriend, Dean, hitting on another girl. Dean is a flippant jerk with a huge ego, poofed up hair and a Ferrari so you know that, on a wealthy douchebag scale of 1 to 10, he rates a 12. Sandy jumps out of Dean's car and goes with a friend to a dance club known to be frequented by people who aren't white so she can at least meet someone who'll piss off her parents. Also, Kevin leaves his wife and son behind, jumps on his motorcycle and heads off to the same club.

That's Kevin. He really loves his wife. That's not her, by the way.

0:35:00 -- As I said, Kevin and Sandy wind up at an inner city club where the only thing they dance is...LAMBADA, THE FORBIDDEN DANCE. I know it's called the Forbidden Dance because that other lambada movie I mentioned was called The Forbidden Dance. One of the character said it had been outlawed in Brazil and that's why it's called that. It basically involves a boy and a girl grinding their crotches against each other repeatedly until the song ends and Kevin does it so expertly that all the club kids become entranced and stop dancing. They follow him into a room and he damn well better not be doing this to teach them math and FUCK FUCK FUCK HE'S DOING IT SO HE CAN TEACH THEM MATH. This really bothers fellow lambadanista Ramone (Adolpho "Shabba-Doo" Quinones who played Ozone in the Breakin' movies and again, the circle is complete). Why? It just does and shut up, that's why. I want to stress how god damn amazed I am at either the sheer stupidity or the sheer balls in making a movie called Lambada and then making it about some guy running an underground math class. Meanwhile, Sandy has also fallen under Kevin's lamabada induced spell but oddly doesn't have a desire to learn math. Instead, she gets hot for teacher as seen in an extended fantasy sequence where she and a shirtless Kevin are doing the lambada. My sex fantasies usually involve actual sex but maybe this is what high school girls actually do so I won't judge. She gets so worked up that she goes back to the club another night and does start grinding with Kevin on the dance floor. I imagine these scenes made the movie very popular with people who think the idea of teachers fucking their students is awesome. Still, she's not Latino so the school should have no problem with it.

1:00:00 -- I have to wonder how Kevin first explained all this to his wife. "Honey, I want to run an underground tutoring class to help kids in the barrio pass their GEDs but the only way they'll respect me and take me seriously will be if I grind up against half dressed club hotties, some of them underage, doing a dance so erotic that it's against the law in the country that invented the thong." "Sounds cool, sweetie. Pick up some milk on the way home." He makes a bit of headway with Ramone by showing him math can be used for pool hustling which makes him a bajillion times cooler than my math teacher or any math teacher ever. Meanwhile, Sandy's lust for Kevin is now so thick you could sell it by the slice. She won't take no for an answer and keeps trying to stick her hand down his pants while he's talking to the school principal. This all seems wrong but you have to realize that stalking and molesting someone was considered adorable back in the 90s. Oh, isn't this movie called Lambada? I forgot because the movie is now about tutoring and teacher fucking so it should have been called that.

Ramone is pushing 40, making him the creepy guy at the club and too old to be in a high school class yet I'm the only one who seems to notice.

1:20:00 -- Sandy dances with Ramone to make Kevin jealous unaware of the fact that Kevin couldn't care less and instead he loads his study group whom he's nicknamed Galaxy High onto a bus and taken them to the school where he works. He has this brilliant, can't-miss idea to use the school's computers to help them practice the GED. It was a bit nostalgic seeing those old 1990 Macs. It made me think that, in just a few years, they'd be using these 8 megabyte hard drives to connect to AOL and to call people they never met dog raping homos on Usenet because someone disagreed with them that Babylon 5 was way better than The X-Files. Anyway, Sandy suddenly noticed that Kevin was not standing around in a jealous rage finally ready to rip her clothes but had, in fact, left so she followed him. Douchebag Dean showed up looking for her and Ramone told him where she was so he activated the douchebag signal to summon his buddies to help him beat up Kevin. Why beat up Kevin? Why not? Ramone underwent a complete personality change and went to the school to help Kevin and Sandy and everyone ended up getting arrested. Kevin got fired and Sandy, who has completely forgotten that she wanted Kevin to ride her like she was Secretariat, organizes the kids to help him get his job back and I have this creeping, terrifying feeling that, somehow, this will all be resolved by putting on a show.

If the 80s had never existed, they would have to have been invented to accommodate this guy.

1:44:00 -- I was wrong. The fact that the movie is called Lambada made me think that the lambada would somehow be involved but that was my fault. Instead of putting on a big show, the whole situation was resolved with a math contest. Despite the fact that Kevin's firing was one of the most justifiable teacher terminations in history, the Superintendent of Schools, for reasons only known to the screenwriters, really wants a reason to let him stay so they decide to hold a math contest. Yes, this movie that started off as a showcase for a sexy dance is ending with complex geometry questions between Galaxy High and Rich Douchebag High and Kevin gets to stay if the barrio kids win. Naturally, it ends in a tie with the ending to be determined by the final question between Dean and Ramone. Ramone frames his answer by describing the pool hustling tactics Kevin had shown him and Galaxy High wins. Kevin gives some emotional speech that causes both sides to realize that we're all brothers under the skin and, finally, a big lambada fueled finale happens right there on school property. I remember not being allowed to do the play Grease because the principal didn't like the subplot of Rizzo's pregnancy scare yet the principal of this elite private school says nothing when everyone runs into the rain and literally starts ripping each other clothes off and grinding against each other. Still, at least the whole stupid math contest was over, as is the movie. And that, folks, is how our ancestors during the strange, primitive time known as 1990 thought it would be a good idea to take the lambada, something that, at the time, was thought of as the mysterious embodiment of sex itself and used it as a plot point in a movie about a wholesome math contest. If you go to film school, please forget you saw any of this.

I would have liked to have gone to the high school that lets you have lambada fueled dance orgies in the rain with your teacher. The pizza parties I had with my teachers were good too, I guess.