STARS: Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey, Cynthia Rhodes, Jerry Orbach

In 1963, a young woman, Baby (Grey) is vactioning with her family at the Kellerman Estate in the Catskills. Innocent and idealistic she is drawn into the world of dancing through her fascination in the hotel’s main instructor, Johnny (Swayze). Baby is slowly exposed to a world she never knew existed and is mesmerised by the experienced Johnny, through the wonderous and magical dances she is taught from him. Their love for each other is abruptly halted when Baby’s father (Orbach) forbids the coupling and Johnny is fired from the hotel. But one more dance at the hotel’s Annual SHOW is just what is needed for Johnny to prove himself to her father and for Baby to prove that she is no longer a baby anymore.

Grey, is wonderful, she has the innocence, youth and natural charm necessary to pull off being a 17 year old in the early 60’s. Although she has had surgery since, her facial features are perfect, contrary to what she may have believed or was told. The dancing is wonderful and although she has some experience with dancing she was believeable as a struggling learner. Swayze, is quite good and although he caused a craze of female followers he still seemed to be trying too hard, only with the acting. Being a real dancer, his dancing especially with Cynthia Rhodes, would have been a piece of cake.

The soundtrack from this movie did extremely well in sales, the mix of older and late 80’s music was complimentary to the movie, and made Dirty Dancing a truly invigorating experience for this era of cinema. In my opinion a breath of fresh air in the romantic movies of the late 80’s.

THE EXTRAS

* Commentary from the writer Eleanor Bergstein, which is very informative and demonstrates a love of this movie.

* Cast and Crew Biographies, Filmographies which also include interactive question and answers with each cast member.

* 3 Music Videos which represent the huge singles that came from the movie’s sountrack album. The videos are

Bill Medley/Jennifer Warnes - (I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life, Eric Carmen - Hungry Eyes and Patrick Swayze - She’s Like The Wind. The videos themselves are of abysmal quality and barely watchable as they have obviously been copied directly from the source VHS copy. The sound though is CD quality in that it is DD2.0.

* Dirty Dancing - Live In Concert As an added bonus we are also given DD-LIC that was released as a stand-alone video around the time that the original video was released back in ‘88. Running about 90 mins it features many of the dancers from the movie and also some of the artists that contributed to the soundtrack such as Eric Carmen complete with mullet haircut and really bad make-up.

* 2 minute featurette called “Relieving the 60’s” which as it’s name suggests takes a nostaligic look back at the fashion, music and people of the era, today.

* 7 minute featurette with cast and crew interviews

* 5 minute Behind-the-scenes feature, showing how they filmed some of the memorable moments in the movie.

* Movie Trailer

* Production Notes which gives information about the movie, the director, writer and the cast.

CONCLUSION

One of the biggest grossing movies in Australia in 1987 has finally made it to DVD and in a fashion worthy to it’s cult status!!