Big Let Down

Patrick and I ordered this movie off of Netflix. We had very, very high hopes. In fact, we were thinking that this might be our Christmas gift du-year. We were wrong.

A while back we rented RIZE, which was pretty incredible. If you're not sure what krumpin' is, RIZE is a good intro, though perhaps skewed toward Tommy the Clown (isn't this a strange post?).

So when I saw this on Netflix, and saw that it had both Shabba Doo (Ozone from Breakin', the best movie ever) and Todd Bridges (Willis from Diff'rent Strokes) I was like, "Add!"

Here's a quote from a review I found on IMDB:

The Bridges/ Shabba Doo trainwreck entitled 'breakin vs krumpin' set sail to
hopefully get peoples interest in the clashing battle between a fairly old hip
hop style of dance VERSUS the new leaders of the proposed future of hip hop
dance. Todd ' WIllis ' Bridges takes the 5 pioneers of Krump under his wing,
while SHabba Doo lofts out to search for lionhearted BBOYs in Socal. this is the
tip of the iceberg, and the beginning of a long end.

My only contention with this quote is the reference to the "long end." More like long beginning. It's almost and hour before the battle starts. The sound quality on this thing is so bad that I could hardly understand what anyone was saying during that hour. The camera work was awful and didn't really let you see the actual dancing.

And in the end, there's no question in my mind that krumpin' won. These krumpers were just crazy, had amazing energy and emotion and totally used the space. The bboys come out all on-beat, their choreographed routines look quaint by comparison and they don't have any emotion at all. And their guy Fire has one trick--he dances inside of his shirt. That's right, he pulls his arms into his shirt and does all of his poppin' in there. WTF?

The biggest let downs are that Shabba Doo doesn't dance at all, and Todd Bridges doesn't box with Vanilla Ice even once.