Hot Steps

My review was written in October 1991 after watching the film on Prism video cassette.

Italian filmmakers come up with an okay made-in-USA variation on the "Dirty Dancing" formula with "Body Moves", a pleasant, wafer-thin youth entertainment.

Filmed on location in New Orleans, the picture fails to make much use of the Big Easy atmosphere. Instead its attractive young American cast spends most of the running time rehearsing for the Hot Steps contest.

Very corny plot twists have rich kid Steve Messina sabotaging the efforts of a rival dance team led by charismatic hero Kirk Rivera. Rivera's beautiful partner Dianne Granger eventually is won over to Messina's team, while his sister, Lindsley Allen, falls in love with Rivera.

Finale is shamelessly sentimental and the dancing becomes an anticlimax, especially due to a repetitious music track.

Granger is quite a discovery and could surface in more mainstream features requiring dancing and spectacular figures in the future. Ditto Rivera. Direction by erstwhile cameraman Gerry Lively is functional.

"We have to be awesome if we want to win!" Though rich brat Kevin is clearly a douche and though his dance moves are clearly cribbed from Vanilla Ice, he hits upon the very truth of what Body Moves and by extension life, is all about.

Like some sort of toolish Knute Rockne whipping the boys into a Gipper-inspired frenzy at halftime of the big game, Kevin (or Kev-In as the license plates on his pansy red sports car read) reaches deep into the very shallow souls of his fellow dance team members to wring all the laughably spastic moves out of them that will be necessary to triumph over all comers! They'll have to be better than good, better even than great, their dancing can only be AWESOME! And because it's never a bad idea to have a backup plan to AWESOME, Kevin also hires the dance gym away from his competitors as well as steals their hottest and best dancer! But don't you damn dare cry for Team Rico just yet! In executing his foul plan of AWESOME plus gym exclusivity plus dancer thievery, Kevin inadvertently created his most deadliest of enemies! His little freaking sister Nancy! Nancy is an aspiring dancer who lives only to get on with one of the dance teams in the area. During her impromptu try out for her brother's team, she is literally laughed out of the room! Nancy is also an aspiring lover of Rico, but as long as the hottest dance bitch in the four known dimensions of existence is dancing and pumping Rico, Nancy can only bide her time for her one chance at dirty dancing immortality! So Nancy really needs to send her jerk brother a thank you card when Kevin finally manages to seduce the ultra sexy Mayra to the dancing dark side thus giving Nancy the opening she's been waiting for! But Nancy is carrying a terrible secret! She was in an accident and her doctors were concerned that she might never walk again! She's recovered, but the strain of the biggest single dancing competition ever conceived by human minds (or at least those in charge of local nightclub Mirage) could very well make her legs just fall right off! Or something - no one ever made it quite clear what her problem was.

All we needed to know was the right before the big event, she was in the ladies room crying and scared to go on with the show! Until a tender moment with Rico allowed her to regain her AWESOME! But what is all this AWESOMEness in service to? What sort of competition could turn brother against sister? Why would Kevin feel compelled to turn a fire hose on the practice Team Rico was holding at an auto salvage yard? What silly-assed dance off would provoke the fun-loving hood and leader of men, Rico, into pushing the traitorous Mayra into a pool and then rolling around with Kevin in a rather pussy-looking brawl? Why Hot Steps of course! But what is this Hot Steps that has turned the Louisiana and Florida locations of this Italian made film into a battleground of sexy conga lines? Okay, you've heard of the Olympics, right? And the Super Bowl? And the Moon Landing? And the Rapture? It's like all of those rolled into one, but with teams of no talent teens shamelessly shimmying around on a small stage in a low rent nightclub! It's pretty much the only thing in the movie that anyone ever talks about. Even one of the typically hideous and catchy songs you would expect from such a film is all about Hot Steps! Body Moves follows the template that God laid down in the beginning for all low budget dance movies where it becomes painfully obvious that the cheapest part of a dance movie is shots of unknowns dancing. There's scenes of Kevin's team rehearsing, then Rico's team rehearsing, then dancing at a nightclub, followed by a bit of scheming and then the cycle repeats itself until it's time for Hot Steps. Which of course is more dancing! Though directed by Gerry Lively, Body Moves is a production of Joe D'Amato's Filmirage company and it has the comfortably cruddy look and feel of one of his Filmirage projects.

It stars no one you've ever heard of or heard from again. The bad hair is complemented by clothing that costume designer and Italian exploitation film legend Laura Gemser surely created as some sort of strange revenge on D'Amato. The dialogue by Daniele Stroppa (as untalented as she is prolific) is noticeably formal, as if written by someone whose native tongue isn't English. That English-speaking actors actually delivered it that way makes it all exponentially worse.

Even beyond all that though, the bad performances by all involved (highlighted by Nancy's doctor and her maid), the forgotten or pointless subplots like the dance instructor's loan shark problem and one of Team Rico's member's obsession with winning a radio contest, and the abrupt and absurd ending (including a super gay face off and friendly handshake between Rico and Kevin) combine to give Body Moves all sorts of the AWESOME that Kevin knew every winner needs!