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Dance Flick

Where there's a will, there's a Wayans - or eight. Dance Flick, a teenpix spoof that might be called Step Up to Get Served at the Save the Last Dance High School Musical Roll Bounce, is a gigglefest written, directed by, and starring a gaggle of Wayans siblings and their spawn.

A scene from Damon Wayans' "Dance Flick." The movie, which opens Friday, stars Damon Wayans Jr., at left. (Photo: http://www.thedanceflick.com)
A scene from Damon Wayans' "Dance Flick." The movie, which opens Friday, stars Damon Wayans Jr., at left. (Photo: http://www.thedanceflick.com)Read more
    by Carrie Rickey | Columnist, Inquirer
    Published 

Where there's a will, there's a Wayans - or eight.

Dance Flick, a teenpix spoof that might be called Step Up to Get Served at the Save the Last Dance High School Musical Roll Bounce, is a gigglefest written, directed by, and starring a gaggle of Wayans siblings and their spawn.

The Wayanses tweaked blaxploitation in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, slashers in Scary Movie. In Dance Flick, they rib the conventions of the gotta-dance, leap-high, footloose, fame-seeking plot.

Will the interracial sweethearts - a very funny Damon Wayans Jr. as Thomas Uncles and a very game Shoshanna Bush as Megan - have the courage to declare their love?

Is the jock (Brendan Hillard as Jack) man enough to declare he prefers dancing to hoops?

Can the aspiring dancers stay on the right side of the law, even though they owe $5,000 to that round mound of transfat, the gangsta Sugar Bear (David Alan Grier)?

The more pertinent question: Can the audience stick with this flick that showed most of its funny bits in the trailer? For the most part, yeah.

Filmgoers need not be familiar with the movies being spoofed. For the best comic shots are lobbed not at dance movies, but at baby mamas who take their infants clubbing and baby daddies whose idea of visitation is a drive-by.

- Carrie Rickey