Greydon Clark, the director of The Forbidden Dance, remembers the arms race well: “I had no idea how quickly he wanted the picture completed. Globus responded in kind, pushing the production schedule of Lambada so that it would be the first film to arrive in theaters. Globus had already announced that Lambada would open on May 4, when Golan revealed an April 6 release for The Forbidden Dance, besting Globus by nearly a month.

That film was already well into pre-production before Golan decided to make his own competing effort, The Forbidden Dance.Īs recalled in the Cannon Films doc Electric Boogaloo, The Forbidden Dance was written for Sawmill Entertainment and Columbia Pictures in just 10 days, and then put on an accelerated production schedule specifically to beat Lambada to the big-screen dance floor. The once-tight duo had decided to make a lambada film before they severed their professional ties: Lambada, which Globus eventually produced for Cannon and Warner Bros. This is, obviously, a weird way to conduct a feud, but both Golan and Globus were well-schooled in the art of turning a flash in the pan trend into a feature film, and both of them wanted to do it better. The two had a reportedly acrimonious split, with each man determined to one up the other with a fresh lambada film. The dueling movies were the product of cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, former heads of the always-cheap and always-fast Cannon Films (home of such features as Breakin’, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, Over the Top, The Last American Virgin, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, and Death Wish II). The next step, obviously, was a pair of movies that both sought to capitalize on America’s apparent love for a dance that was entirely advertised as being the closest thing to sex that two people could engage in, with their clothes still on their sweating, writhing bodies. The sexy dance from Brazil steadily shimmied its way up and around the globe in the late 80s, eventually making its way from South to North America, where it was hailed as something of a dance craze.

The world-even the trend-crazed world of 1990-did not need two lambada movies.

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