Cynthia Dale

(On Cable TV, June 2021) While I was alive for the early-1980s aerobics craze, I was (as a prepubescent boy) part of neither the primary nor the secondary audience for it. But thanks to the power of movies and profit-seeking film producers, the craze has been immortalized and we can all rejoice in the results. Piece of evidence: Heavenly Bodies, a made-in-Canada aerobixploitation film with a threadbare plot and many, many shots of women exercising. Featuring plucky entrepreneurs creating their dance studio to escape the drudgery of 9-to-5 work, the film gets most of its dramatic “structure” from a rivalry with another, less nice dance studio owner who has vowed to destroy them. It ends, as it should, with a big dance competition. But no one has ever watched Heavenly Bodies for the plot in its thirtysomething-year history. Most 1980s viewers watched it for the aerobics factor, there was probably a twenty-year lull starting in 1990 and twenty-first century viewers probably watching simply to gawk at what was considered cool at the time. Notice that I haven’t included voyeurs in the list—Despite more neon leotards than you’d ever seen at once, Heavenly Bodies isn’t particularly sexy nor revealing—you’d see more flesh in most non-aerobics horror films of the time. It also counts that the film is more interested in delivering dance session after dance session — there are overt references to Flashdance here in between the aerobics showcases. Cynthia Dale is not bad and rather cute as the plucky heroine, but she’s only a component of a film interested in showing as much aerobics as it can, plot justifications pending. It’s not particularly good, but it’s memorable and rather charming in its aerobics-obsessed mindset.