Footloose (1984) [4K UHD Review]

Footloose shimmies and shakes its way across the screen with all the subtlety of a fiend writhing through the worst agonies of a three-day narc withdrawal bender. Just when you thought the high-octane shockgasms of the 50s juvenile delinquent era were safely entombed, along comes this unholy resurrection to stomp its Reeboks all over those graves.

Kevin Bacon was the face of Middle American 80s young white man angst

From the second Kevin Bacon‘s Ren McCormack swaggers his urban edge into the neon hellscape of Beaumont, you know you’re in for a knuckle-dragging rampage of anti-establishment rabblerousing on a scale not seen since the last fevered antiguerilla raid at Huey Newton’s Black Panther headquarters. Director Herbert Ross doesn’t so much spit in the eye of small-town conservative normativity as orally violate it with a gasoline-soaked sawbuck wrapped in rusty razor wire. If this movie was any more hostile to the simple agrarian heartland ethos it’s saltburn-shaming, the theaters would have to be torn down and the ground salted afterwards.

For the uninitiated, Footloose spins the sordid yarn of a big city rebel student agitating to bring sinful public dancin’ back to a rural po-dunk burg that outlawed it years prior after a tragic vehicular dust-up claimed some local loafers. Bacon plays the proto-Antichrist proto-agitator with the same reckless impetuousness he brought to his role in the immortal Pornopunksploitation shriekfest Dudes. The man is pure protoplasmic id of the highest degree, shakin’ and heavin’ his muscular chassis with epileptic abandon, as if possessed by the unshakable demonic force of boogie fever.

Lori Singer still doesn’t enough credit for the movie

But the real showstopper is Lori Singer as the town preacher’s daughter who trades in her purity ring and gentile inhibitions for big city stickwork under the irresistible influence of Bacon’s pelvis-pumped antics. When she hits peak possessed apostate during the delirious climax and unleashes that epic floor-scorching “Dancing in the Sheets” bacchanal, I half expected the screen to spontaneously melt and ooze torrents of bubbling teen groin sauce. Her performance induced a throbbing punk rock footgasm so violently rapturous it retroactively fertilized my grandmother’s ovaries clear back in the Mesozoic era!

Beyond the hormonal hellfire histrionics, Footloose possesses a viciously anarchic anti-authoritarian spirit so belligerently envenomed it makes the most famous counterculture screes of the 60s Protest movements look about as potent as a whiny blog rant by Ben Shapiro. Ross doesn’t just upturn nostalgic cultural norms, he stuffs them into a burlap sack filled with wriggling wolverines and rusty chainsaws blades and tosses the whole bloody mess onto a burning cross erected on the rusticated village green. Conservatism, organized religion, the nuclear family – no ossified small-town icon is left undesecrated during the raging bacchanalia of debauchery on display.

Even the fleeting tragic backstory involving the town’s dead teens feels less like a somber greek chorus and more like a nihilistic provocation foreshadowing an even more shocking Dionysian atrocity lying in wait. At one point I half expected the whole town to spontaneously combust in a thermonuclear furybomb of hysterical deviance, leaving nothing behind but a smoldering impact crater filled with pubic hairs and residual jock sweat vapor. Needless to say, I watched the whole incendiary shebang on the edge of my seat with a protective welder’s mask shielding my face from the pyroclastic waves of pure uncut teenage demonic possession.

Indiana has to have ID for what now?

What’s most amazing is that Footloose somehow slipped through the clenched prudish fists of the 1980s suburban cineplex compliance officers without getting reclassified as a Class 3 Felony Indecency. This is the type of rampaging mayhem state legislators used to host mass video burning parties over (never forget those poor incinerated tapes of Better Off Dead and Surf Nazis Must Die). More importantly, it laid the groundwork for controversial shocker pop hit sprees like Dirty Dancing and Lambada a few years later. Without Footloose there to detonate the first subversive cracks in the crumbling facade of squeaky-clean Ronald Reagan junior beefcakery, we might never have gotten the gloriously venereal likes of She’s All That or American Pie.

And in that regard, I can’t overstate the importance of this delinquent fever dream of a movie as a pivotal tectonic gamechanger in the cultural zeitgeist. Footloose represented a staggering evolutionary leap for American cinema. It defiled the staid 50s simplicity of Grease with a savage cult of reckless mutant showdancing—a violent new discipline as transgressive and anarchic as goblin punk itself.

Love it, hate it, or require years of intensive outpatient psychotherapy to purge it from your traumatized psyche, Footloose is cinematic antinomianism distilled to its most corrosive, uncompromising…and ultimately exhilarating essence. You’ll never look at sock-hopping the same way again after spending a feverish two hours breathing in the rarefied fumes of its bombastic scofflawry.

Footloose comes to 4K UHD from Paramount

Footloose comes to 4K UHD from Paramount in a way that I’m sure is going to annoy the holy hell out of many home theater snobs. In a time when Aliens, True Lies and The Abyss have let them down…I guess there are a few screaming heads left to get mad at Footloose. Well, the movie has always looked kind of soft. My issue with the 2160p 4K transfer is that the quality swings so wildly from scene to scene. The domestic stuff, the church scenes, the big dance and the tractor chicken fight look stunning in 4K. But anything in a slightly dark environment looks like a Beta tape stored in a salt mine.

While I don’t know that many fans of Footloose, I know what the movie should look like and dark levels shouldn’t crush people out of the frame. The DTS-HD 5.1 master audio track is comparable to the Blu-ray with not much upgrade. However, I do enjoy the special features which all seem to be Blu-ray ports too. Oh well, pick it up if you’re curious how it looks in 4K UHD.

Footloose is now available on 4K UHD