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Heavenly Bodies
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Fun City Editions Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (6th December 2024). |
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The Film
 A clerical assistant by day, Sam (My Bloody Valentine's Cynthia Dale) dreams of opening up her own dance studio. She and her friends KC (Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed's Patricia Idlette) and Patty (Prom Night's Pam Henry) go in on an old warehouse with inexplicably good flooring and canvas the city with fliers and "Heavenly Bodies" becomes an overnight success with working class clients intimidated by bigger health clubs and even a commission training a local football team where she meets love interest Steve (Visiting Hours' Richard Rebiere) who charms her with both practical jokes and home-cooked meals, as well as getting on with her son Joel (The Boys Club's Stuart Stone). Sam, however, has bigger ambitions, wanting to buy the building and expand, and the opportunity presents itself when TV producer Harriet (Adventures in Babysitting's Linda Sorensen) wants to produce a fitness show and is looking for a hostess. Sam goes to the audition and meets with Harriet's approval; however, her director (The Brood's Reiner Schwarz) is "in bed" with wealthy sports club chain owner Jack Pierson (The Pumaman's Walter George Alton) who is not happy when his girlfriend Debbie (Separate Vacations' Laura Henry) is not immediately offered the job despite the director's high-pressure endorsement. When Sam wins the role and Jack becomes interested in her – during a time of strain in her relationship with Steve who is looking for something more solid than a sports career – Debbie becomes jealous and pushes Jack's shadow investor (Goldfinger's Cec Linder) to put the competition out to pasture by buying the Heavenly Bodies building out from under Sam. Sam, however, takes to the airwaves with a public challenge, and the resulting bad publicity means Jack cannot back down, lining up ten of his best against ten her best in a televised workout down the last person standing. Canada's answer to the previous year's Flashdance and the ensuing cycle of dance films, Heavenly Bodies was the only directorial effort of Lawrence Dane (Happy Birthday to Me) who had earlier produced a couple films including the Deliverance-esque backwoods horror film Rituals, and was also the first collaboration between producers Andras Hamori and Robert Lantos who would form Alliance Communications, the company brought us the works of Atom Egoyan (Exotica) and post-Hollywood David Cronenberg (Crash) in the nineties. While Dane and cinematographer Thomas Burstyn (Toy Soldiers) do a good job emulating the model film visually – if not quite a slickly, favoring traditional diffusion over backlighting, smoke, and pushed processing – and it is nice to see Dale get to do more than whimper, scream, and take a pick-axe to the gut, the song choices are nowhere near as iconic despite the involvement of some of Giorgio Moroder's collaborators and the script takes a roundabout approach to what should be a simple vehicle for dance sequences and musical montages. Sam's stated motivation is not really compelling even after she is revealed to be a single mother, and there is no real hint of any kind of conflict for the first half-hour when Jack and Debbie are finally introduced (the shot of Sam and her friends poaching clients from Pierson's club may be too fleeting to qualify as foreshadowing); and, just like the climactic challenge, many of the aerobic scenes feel like they are more about duration and viewer endurance than conveying plot points visually. The best dance sequences are actually Dale's solos, particularly when she abuses lighting and grip equipment jumping and spinning around the empty television studio after landing the job (choreographer Brian Foley had previously staged Lynn-Holly Johnson's ice skating sequences in both Ice Castles and For Your Eyes Only). Some of this may have as much to do with the slavish focus on the moving bodies, although there may also have been some concessions to the American co-producers in the oiled-up sweaty sex scenes for Playboy Productions and privileging pacing over narrative with an "editorial consultant" credit on behalf of Producers Sales Organization for Robert K. Lambert who was responsible for post-production re-editing on films like Dead & Buried for P.S.O. and The Last Action Hero (which had still been filming new sequences the week before release). While it had nowhere near the impact of Flashdance, Heavenly Bodies is at least one of the funner entries in the brief aerobics craze boom. 
Video
Although released theatrically by MGM who licensed the film to CBS/Fox who put it out on video on their Key Video line, Heavenly Bodies was one of the pre-1986 MGM titles for which only the television rights were acquired in the Ted Turner acquisition so Warner Bros. did not have home video rights as they had with another MGM-distributed Producers Sales Organization title Nine ½ Weeks; indeed, while the film continued to show on cable via HBO in the eighties and then later on through TCM, the home video rights were unclear making previous attempts at physical media release impossible. We do not know from just who Fun City Editions got the home video rights, but their 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer comes not from the HD master shown on TCM but a brand new 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative. The image is stunning, retaining a healthy grain texture that makes itself particularly evident in resolving the overcast and wet Canadian exteriors, heavy use of natural light in some of the wide shots of the warehouse workout sessions, and crisper close-ups of sweaty and oil-slick skin in spandex with popping primaries in the wardrobe contrasted with a more muted color scheme in the décor. The image is free of damage (and clips during Dale's interview suggest what the master looked like before cleanup). 
Audio
If the Dolby Stereo soundtrack does not have the same kind of sonic umph of Flashdance, it seems to be more down to the song choices than the Canadian film industry at that time being more accustomed to working in mono, as "The Beast in Me" sequence brings the track to life, and there is a distinction evident between the fidelity of source music and songs used as underscore. Optional English SDH subtitles are included, although they denote KC as "Casey". 
Extras
Extras start with a new audio commentary by former TCM programmer Millie De Chirico and film aficionado Jeffrey Mixed. While it is a cliché of such tracks that the commentators discuss how they first discovered the film, this has some justification in that like them some of us may indeed have seen the tape on the rental wall and passed it up repeatedly as a Flashdance knockoff and the rights issues kept it from wider physical media distribution at a time when some of us the same age might have started looking back at such film. Both Chirico and Mixed attribute the New Beverly Cinema's Phil Blankenship's obsession with the film to turning them onto it, with Chirico discovering it was available to program when she was at TCM, and Mixed revealing the difficulty they had tracing the video rights owner when he was at Shout! Factory. They both discuss the aerobic craze of the eighties and some other more mainstream examples and some less so like the Spanish-produced, Florida-lensed Pulsebeat, and poke fun at some of the tropes including the yuppie villain, his oversexed bombshell lover, and how Sam's all-inclusive club seems to be entirely populated by "heavenly bodies" who are also all professional dancers. They also discuss the film's origins in a completely different thriller script by Ron Base and the oddity of the film being the one-off directorial effort of prolific actor Dane. In what seems like a separately-recorded segment inserted into the track, Chirico reveals that the Moroder connection to the soundtrack was because the music was produced by Flashdance's Peter Guber and John Peters who had produced that film with Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer.  The disc also includes "A Little Bit of Gold Dust" (14:02), an interview with Dale who had been in musical theater since she was a child and got the audition through Lantos who was her brother-in-law at the time. She reveals that the film was shot in eighteen days, during which she discovered the difference between being a lead in musical theater and carrying a film. She also reveals that choreographer Foley had been her teacher for most of her life and that the film's dancers were all her studio colleagues. Extras close with an image gallery.
Packaging
The first pressing of the standard edition includes a booklet with essays by Nathan Holmes – whose "Technicolor Torontopia" discusses the way the film missed its aerobics dance craze vogue but built up its reputation as a sleeper in the wake of Dale's subsequent television popularity and the emergence of other Canadian industry talents – while Margaret Barton-Fumo's "Heavenly Bodies" focuses on the songs that make up the soundtrack including some thematic elements in the lyrics.  A website-exclusive includes a limited edition slipcover.
Overall
While it had nowhere near the impact of Flashdance, Heavenly Bodies is at least one of the funner entries in the brief aerobics craze boom.
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