As if this film couldn't get any worse, a mime guides our three protagonists through door. Inside, we see more kids dancing to awful pop music. Is this a lame movie or a guided tour of the circles of hell? Thankfully, they move on. We see a boxing gym with older kids practicing, I assume, in order to punch the snot out of each other one day. Kelly is introduced to Byron, the old, semi-coherent trainer who is in charge of the community center.
Since its been almost four minutes since the last one, everyone starts breakdancing again while we listen to another musical abomination. Ballet dancers dance. Little kids breakdance. Young people dance outside. Ozone and Turbo dance. Kelly joins in. I see the youngest case of jerri-curl affliction I've ever seen bounce around on the dance floor. Watching these recurring synth-pop dance scenes is worse, I think, than having your appendix burst; I'm sure it hurts like hell, but at least it can only happen once. Kelly agrees to work at the community center with Ozone and Turbo. She must really, really, really be out of options.
Now to introduce the main bad guy in the film. How do I know he's the bad guy? Well, he's wearing a suit and he's not related to Kelly, of course. He stands outside the front of the community center alongside a guy looking at blueprints and a mousy bald guy with glasses I can't remember the name of, but anyone who has seen '80's movies involving greedy businessmen would recognize the face. We learn that the suit guy is Mister Douglas, who outdoes even Kelly's father in arrogance and snobbishness. He plans to have the community center condemned (I beat him to it) and replaced by a shopping center. Douglas believes that because of his shopping center, property values in the neighborhood will skyrocket. I agree but think that would be due more to the disappearance of greasy breakdancing gangs of children roaming the streets.
I guess the filmmakers thought at this point the audience needed some time to digest all of the plot points being dashed out at breakneck speed, so, yes, we get another damned music montage of people dancing. They don't even bother to change the setting this time, it happens again at the community center. Awful music, people dance, kids rap… you know the rest. Some identical footage may have been used in both of these dance montages, but if you think I'm going to go back and examine this shit frame by frame you have severely overestimated my pain threshold.
Douglas' mousy bald guy lackey, city planner Randall, stands in the city's engineering office and describes to a lady there the deplorable conditions of the community center (he should've showed her the music montage), in an attempt to get the place condemned and his boss' shopping center plan approved. The lady from the office seems to agree with the proposal.
Cut to a nightclub, where, yeah… bad music… dancing… can't… go… on. One of the singers on stage has a very close resemblance to Robin Quivers, radio shock jock Howard Stern's newswoman. The other singer is a woman whose backstory, I assume, would be that she sings part-time at night to raise funds for some much-needed dental work. Ice-T appears as the club's DJ and thus fires the first rocket into his 'gangsta' reputation. Ozone and Turbo are dancing when Kelly walks in and greets them. Some woman dancing takes a look at Kelly and sneers. Next, a group of Hispanic guys wearing identical shirts and bandannas on their heads walk in. The lead guy makes his way over to Ozone and confronts him, stating, "Electros rule the dance floor now, sucka!" Ozone isn't amused and they trade a few insults. Things get intense before the two of them get separated by their friends. That was a close one; they almost touched each other.
The next day Byron mutters to Ozone the bad news he received. It turns out they need two-hundred thousand dollars to perform repairs on the community center, or else it will be condemned and destroyed. Byron, Kelly, Ozone, Turbo, Sleepy, Dopey, Donner and Blitzen head over to the engineering office to speak with the same lady who Randall spoke to. She tells them they only have 30 days to make the necessary repairs to the center or else its tits up.
Our protagonists and what I can only assume by now are legions of amphetamine-addicted orphans get to work raising money for the center. They wash cars, sell lemonade and the damned mime friggin' mimes. Of course, all of this cannot be shown without bad music and more breakdancing mixed in. At the end of the day, they count up seven thousand dollars raised. Depressed, Byron and the breakdance triumvirate mull over what they could do to raise even more money. Turbo comes up with an idea to perform a street festival for the neighborhood, with all the kids and everyone doing all the dancing and crap we've been watching this whole time.
I'm not sure why Turbo thinks that people in the neighborhood would bother to spend money to see something they can see for free outside their window any time of day, but that's beside the point. Even if there were a show worth seeing, I think the neighbors would stay home on purpose, joyfully counting down the days until the community center's demolition. Never mind my logic, however, as everyone agrees it's a swell idea. Cut to a fancy restaurant, where Kelly has dinner with her agent. He informs her of a great opportunity to audition to be the lead dancer in a show playing in Paris.
Back at the community center, Ozone is busy helping everyone make crafts and crap for the upcoming fundraising festival. That girl that sneered at Kelly in the club walks in and chats with him. Kelly walks in and sneering girl gets mad and leaves in a huff (or a minute and a huff, as Groucho might say). On a side note, sneering girl was played by Susie Bono (so named at the time), Sonny Bono's third wife. Taking a quick look at her IMDB page, it shows they got divorced in 1984, the same year this film was made. Whether her embarassingly bad performance here was a contributing factor or not I leave to your imagination.
Kelly tells Ozone about her opportunity but he isn't pleased, immediately intimating that Kelly doesn't really care about the community center. Damn you Kelly, for trying to get a job doing something you like that actually pays money! I don't see why Ozone is so upset that one of the 297 people at the community center might not make it to the festival, unless he was counting on Kelly to do something, ahem… intimately entertaining for the customers to hit that $200,000. mark. Before Ozone can continue his bitch-fit, a spray-paint can crashes through a window. He runs out to investigate, and sees two guys from the Electro gang. They run away, so Ozone, Turbo, Kelly, Yogi, Bam-Bam and Pebbles give chase. This leads to some highway underpass where we see the rest of the Electros waiting for them.
When I saw the next scene I immediately realized there was no way I could possibly do it justice with words. Once you think you've seen everything, this movie fires another fifty-megaton bomb of idiocy into your face. Ozone and the head Electro have a stare down and exchange some smack-talk. The challenge is given and accepted. One of the Electros gets up and… starts playing some more horrendous synth-pop. The thinly mustachioed Electro gets up and launches the first salvo by… dancing. She's female, by the way; I might have thrown you off by mentioning her mustache. She also has out-of-control poofy hairdo that seems to dance independently of the rest of her body. Poofy girl wears an intense, serious look the entire time she dances. Now the rest of the Electros join the attack with their moves that look less like breakdancing but more like the most nervous people in history. Our heroes meet the challenge by doing their own series of jerky moves; everyone's faces are now intense, as if locked in a fight to the death. I stubbornly await a punchline that never arrives.
