The lambada, once a Brazilian dance, was carpetbagged to Paris. There, entrepreneurs turned a Bolivian pop song and a common-denominator Caribbean beat into a pan-European hit and dance craze, involving undulating, bikini-clad rumps and female-groin-to-male-thigh contact. Some parties hope the lambada will catch on here, but if the onrush of hype hasn’t already befuddled Americans about what, exactly, it is, ”Lambada” and ”The Forbidden Dance,” two films released Friday, should easily complete the job.
In ”The Forbidden Dance,” the lambada figures prominently in the preposterous plot; the soundtrack includes the hit single by Kaoma. The glossier, music-video-ready ”Lambada,” meanwhile, throws a few torrid dance sequences into an otherwise heartwarming and equally absurd story about – what else? – a math teacher. What the two films have in common, along with the attempt to pass off all sorts of American dance music as lambada fodder, is that both film makers were inspired by the lambada to decry anti-Mexican prejudice in Los Angeles. Such are the workings of the Hollywood mind.
In ”Lambada,” Kevin Laird (J. Eddie Peck) – born Mexican, adopted and highly assimilated -teaches math at a Beverly Hills high school by day. Then he trades his tweeds and car for a leather jacket and a motorcycle and rides to a spotless East Los Angeles club where, when he’s not dancing, he holds high-school equivalency classes in a back room. A student with a crush on him discovers his double life, worlds collide and the whole thing has to be settled by, naturally, a ”Super Quiz” math competition that pits the Beverly Hills brats against the colorful, underprivileged club kids.
”Lambada” is the kind of bizarrely updated old hat in which the club’s kindly bouncer, Big, tells a reluctant student, Ramon, ”You got potential – college potential.” Interspersed with the credits are scenes of the club kids holding down responsible jobs; they’ve lambada’d their way to upward mobility.
”The Forbidden Dance,” meanwhile, belongs in a time capsule as a 1990 souvenir of self-congratulatory cause-mongering. When the nasty multi-national conglomerate Petramco forces a tribe of Amazon Indians out of their rain forest, Nisa (Laura Herring), the tribal king’s daughter, decides to fly to Los Angeles with the tribe’s shaman and confront Petramco’s chairman.
That never happens; she becomes a maid for a rich family and wins the heart of the black-sheep son, who happens to live for dancing. In ever-escalating improbabilities they face down the son’s snooty friends (who call her a ”wetback”), break up, reunite at a sex club (where the plot lingers), battle thugs, and win an audition to be guest dancers on a live national telecast with Kid Creole and the Coconuts. There, of course, they can take their case to the public and save the rain forest, not to mention the ozone layer.
Where ”Lambada” has a burnished, big-budget glow, ”The Forbidden Dance” is B-movie drab, and its dance sequences are barely sexier than a bowling tournament. But connoisseurs of clunky dialogue (”It’s a shame to clear this jungle, it’s so pretty; but business is business”) and shameless continuity lapses should look no further.
Lambada (1990)
Directed by: Joel Silberg
Starring: J. Eddie Peck, Melora Hardin, Shabba-Doo, Ricky Paull Goldin, Basil Hoffman, Dennis Burkley, Leticia Vasquez, Gina Ravera, Kayla Blake, Debra Hopkins
Screenplay by: Joel Silberg, Sheldon Renan
Production Design by: Bill Cornford
Cinematography by: Roberto D’Ettorre Piazzoli
Film Editing by: Andy Horvitch
Art Direction by: Jack Cloud
Music by: Greg De Belles
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release Date: March 16, 1990
Views: 593
