Kaoma, ‘Lambada’: Fraud, hubris, and two bad movies

Kaoma
‘Lambada’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
Number 4 on December 3rd, 1989

1. Chorando se foi

There’s a weird phenomenon in the film industry known as “twin movies”, which is when two similar but unrelated films appear around simultaneously, causing no end of confusion for cinema-goers.

Twin movies have been a problem since the dawn of cinema, with two competing versions of Ivanhoe appearing in 1913. And it’s a problem that continues today—2024 saw two musical biopics which replaced their subjects with a high-concept CGI avatar (Robbie Williams is a monkey in Better Man; Pharrell Williams appears in Lego form in Piece By Piece). The 90s were something of a golden age for twin movies: think of Deep Impact and Armageddon, Dante’s Peak and Volcano, or Antz and A Bug’s Life.

At the very start of the 90s, one pair of twin movies raced to be first at the box office. The race ended in a tie, with both movies appearing on March 16, 1990. Moviegoers found themselves having to choose between two very different films centered on the Lambada, a Brazilian dance craze that had been popular in Europe the previous summer.

Moviegoers chose neither. Although both movies were rushed out, Lambada-mania had mostly died out by 1990. The films were a disaster for the men responisble—two Israeli cousins who had once been responsible. Meanwhile, disaster was striking the two Frenchmen who’d made ‘Lambada’ a hit in the first place. Ultimately, the Lambada craze was a disaster for almost everyone involved.

2. Quem um dia só me fez chorar

In 2014, Haaretz ran an obituary titled “The Father of the Israeli Film Industry”. The article celebrated the life of Menahem Golan, a man responsible for some of the best—and worst—movies ever made.

Golan was born in 1929 and, as a young air force pilot, fought in the Palestine War that led to the foundation of Israel. After the war, he travelled the world, studying theatre in London and film-making in New York, before earning his spurs as an assistant to world’s greatest low-budget filmmaker, Roger Corman.

When Golan returned to Israel, he began directing and producing, and almost immediately found success. He wrote and produced Sallah Shabati, Israel’s first Oscar-nominated movie, and developed three more Oscar nominees, including his own directorial effort, the action movie Operation Thunderbolt. Back home, he produced teen sex comedy Lemon Popsicle, an enormous domestic blockbuster that is still one of the most successful films in Israel’s history.

Inevitably, Golan’s thoughts turned to Hollywood. He’d already formed a successful working relationship with his cousin, Yoram Globus, and the two had achieved a nice balance: Golan as the passionate cinephile, Globus the get-it-done money man. Between them, they reckoned that they could produce huge commercial hits like Lemon Popsicle and respectable art like Sallah Shabati. Best of all, they knew how to make movies on a budget.

Golan and Globus went to Hollywood and that’s where they found Cannon Films. Cannon had existed since the mid-60s, mostly operating as a clearing house for badly-dubbed softcore European porn, which paid the bills. Cannon had also been dipping their toes into low-budget original productions, giving Lynn Redgrave her big-screen debut in The Happy Hooker and even earning an Oscar nomination for Joe, a revenge thriller with elements of Death Wish and Taxi Driver.

Cannon’s finances were a disaster, and its reputation was mostly as purveryors of cheap schlock. They were a perfect fit for Golan and Globus, who were strangers to trashy movies themselves. The duo bought out Cannon and became the newest producers in Hollywood.

Cannon Films 2.0 started with lofty goals. Their first major release was The Apple, a $10 million sci-fi musical directed by Golan that the cousins believed could be bigger than Grease. It was not. It appeared in late 1980, shortly after the somewhat similar Xanadu had flopped hard at the box office, and The Apple managed to do even worse. The Apple is still frequently featured in Worst Movie Ever lists.

(One slightly notable thing about The Apple: It does an impressive job of predicting reality TV shows like The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent. The movie was choreographed by Nigel Lythgoe, who would end up becoming a judge on exactly that kind of show.)

Golan and Globus would have crashed out of Hollywood as quickly as they arrived, but for two unlikely hits. The first was Death Wish II, a meretricious sequel to the vigilante movie that had revitalised Charles Bronson’s career in the mid-70s. Any attempt at social commentary was abandoned, replaced instead with more gore, more guns, and more female nudity. Critics hated it more than they hated The Apple, but audiences lapped it up.

Their next success was Enter The Ninja, a dumb and cheap action flick with not much going for it, apart from the legendary Sho Kosugi as an evil ninja. Enter The Ninja arrived at exactly the moment when American homes were adopting home video recorders, and cheap martial arts movies were perfect VHS-filler. Enter The Ninja’s success actually led to a wave of imitators, and ninjaspoitation movies became a profitable niche until the genre was killed by Ninja 3: The Domination, which might genuinely be the worst film ever made. Ninja 3 was, needless to say, also made by Cannon.

By the mid-80s, Cannon had settled into a rhythm of making quick, cheap, bad taste movies that would often go straight to video. This approach wasn’t likely to win many Oscars. But it would allow them to move fast and jump on emerging trends. Such as breakdancing.

3. Chorando estará ao lembrar de um amor

Around the time Menahem Golan was fighting in the Palestine War, Jean Georgakarakos was being bullied by French kids in Brittany.

Georgakarakos was born in 1940, the sone of Greek parents who moved to France just before the war. He spent his whole life feeling like an outsider, until rock’n’roll appeared and saved his life.

Georgakarakos rebranded himself as Jean Karakos and tried being a rock star, but failed due to a severe lack of talent. He had more successs as a record salesman and, by his mid-20s, he’d built a national chain of stores called Pop Shop. In the late 60s, Karakos sold his record shops and started his own label, which mostly specialised in free jazz.  

It was almost 1968 and revolution was brewing across France, but Karakos didn’t get involved. In an interview before his death, he said:

“I sympathized with ultra-left ideas, but never wanted to be part of a group, especially not a political one. Meetings to establish the agenda for the next meeting, that wasn’t my thing. My political contribution was to provide the music and the sound of the revolution which was free jazz.”

A year later, Karakos helped organize France’s answer to Woodstock, the Actuel Festival (which was actually held in Belgium because they couldn’t get a licence anywhere else). Most of the five-day festival was dominated by the kind of free jazz and world music that Karakos adored, but he grudgingly allowed a few pop acts to join in, such as Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and Pink Floyd.

(One of the people working on the Actuel Festival was a young French guy called Olivier Lorsac, whom Karakos befriended. Karakos and Lorsac wouldn’t see each other very much for the next 20 years, but their next project would be explosive.)

Actuel, like Woodstock, ended in chaos as thousands of ticketless hippies stormed the venue. The financial disaster left Karakos floundering for years, and his label collapsed in the mid-70s.

Rather than give up, Karakos relocated to New York and founded a new label, Celluloid Records, with an even bigger range of jazz and world music. They also stumbled across the occasional pop hit, such as the US distribution of Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’. Legendary in-house producer Bill Laswell also attracted talent like Brian Eno and Herbie Hancock. Laswell’s own band, Material, released an album in 1982 featuring vocals by a young, unknown singer called Whitney Houston.

Arguably the most notable thing about Celluloid is their early involvement in rap. They put out records by artists including Afrika Bambaata and Fab 5 Freddie in 1982, helping the nascent artform gain a foothold, although Karakos himself didn’t always understand that music. Karakos in later life would say that his “first true fuck up” was saying no to Public Enemy, who were begging to sign with Celluloid.

By 1983, rap was starting to go overground, and the respected studio Orion Pictures (who would win the 1984 Best Picture Oscar for Amadeus) started work on a movie called Beat Street, which would be an authentic snapshot of the new, emerging culture.

Later in 1983, a girl was walking along Venice Beach in LA when she saw some breakdancers. She told her dad about how cool they looked. Her father, Menahem Golan, immediately began work on a breakdancing movie.

4. Que um dia não soube cuidar

1984’s Beat Street was made with care and good intentions, but it wasn’t made fast enough. Cannon rushed Breakin’ outin under six months, becoming the first truly successful big-screen depiction of hip-hop culture. Breakin’ wa sso successful that they rushed out a sequel before the end of the year: Breakin 2’: Electric Boogaloo. Both films were huge wins for Golan and Globus.

But the cousins weren’t just making schlock. Their shoot-the-picture-first-ask-questions-later approach started to attracted some of the biggest names in cinema, including Francis Ford Coppolla, Franco Zeffirelli and Jean-Luc Goddard. Cannon helped John Cassavetes make Love Streams, which is often regarded as one of the best films ever. In 1985, they produced Runaway Train, based on a screenplay by Akira Kurosawa. It was nominated for the Palme D’Or and two Oscars, one of which was Best Supporting Actor. For Eric Roberts. Eric Roberts. As in, Eric Roberts, the legendary hackwho was last seen in a Michael Flatley vanity project.

That said, Cannon did make a lot of schlock. If you grew up in the VHS era, you probably recognise the Cannon logo from Chuck Norris actioners like Invasion U.S.A. or Missing In Action, or the Michael Dudikoff American Ninja series, or the dire Indiana Jones knock-offs, King Solomon’s Mines and Allan Quartermain and the City of Lost Gold, starring Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone.

(Electric Dreams, the wonderful documentary about Cannon films, has a great story about the Allan Quartermain movies. Golan came in one day and said “I want that Stone woman!”, so his assistant got in touch with Sharon Stone. When Sharon appeared on set, Golan said, “Who the hell is she?” He’d been referring to Kathleen Turner, who had recently starred in Romancing The Stone.)

Cannon could have kept going on this model: pump out 30-40 low-budget movies per year, hope you score the occasional hit. Golan and Globus wanted more, however, and the pair decided it was time to start investing in bigger movies. Their first effort was Over The Top, a sports film about the deeply uncinematic sport of arm-wrestling. Cannon paid Sylvester Stallone $12 million to star, making him the highest-paid actor in the world. It was not a good investment.

Next, they started work on two huge IPs: Superman and Masters Of The Universe. Both had real potential to become blockbusters; both failed to bust any blocks. During the Masters of the Universe shoot, Stallone visited the set to see his old Rocky IV nemesis, Dolph Lundgren. When Stallone realised that Lundgren was playing the lead, an incredulous Stallone said, “You’re giving this guy lines?”

Christopher Reeve agreed to come back for Superman IV: The Quest for Peace on one condition, that Cannon would fund his passion project, a detective movie called Smart Street. Smart Street proved to be a breakout film for co-star Morgan Freeman, who was nominated for an Oscar that year. Superman IV was nominated for two Razzies and is yet another Cannon film that often appears on Worst Movies Ever lists (it is unspeakably dire).

Cannon Films struggled on for a few years, reverting to their familiar mix of high art (Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear) and straight-to-video trash (Death Wish 4: The Crackdown). Maybe the definitive movie of this era is Cyborg, a low-budget sci-fi actioner starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. Cyborg was mostly filmed on sets built for more ambitious Cannon projects that were aborted for financial reasons, including Masters Of The Universe 2 and a live-action Spider-Man.

Golan and Globus also kept trying to cash in on youth culture and dance crazes, with things like Rappin’ (1985) and Salsa (1988). Towards the end of the 80s, they were developing a film called JAM, which would be a Stand And Deliver/Dangerous Minds-style education drama that also had some urban dancing. But things were going badly at Cannon HQ. The company was facing bankruptcy and Golan and Globus were increasingly at each other’s throats.

Golan eventually quit and formed his own company, while Globus tried to steady the Cannon ship. Both men were felt that they had the rights to keep developing the dance movie, JAM. For some reason, both men decided that JAM should involve a new Brazilian dance craze called the Lambada.

And both men were absolutely determined that their Lambada movie would be the first one to hit the big screen.

5. A recordação vai

Okay, remember Olivier Lorsac, the guy who befriended Jean Karakos at French Woodstock in 1969?

As Cannon films was falling apart, Lorsac was having his own movie-related crisis. Lorsac had spent the last twenty years flitting between different branches of the entertainment industry, often working as a producer or a PR guy. He’d earned a reputation as a nasty piece of work, especially among journalists, and those chickens came home to roost in 1988 when he released his directorial debut, a crime thriller called In Extremis. The film was a stinker (even Cannon would have thought twice about releasing it) and critics took gleeful revenge on Lorsac.

Lorsac was suicidal, but things turned around when he reconnected with his old friend Jean Karakos. Karakos was still in New York and running Celluloid Records, which now had an incredible roster of world music artists like Fela Kuti and Youssou N’Door. Nevertheless, Celluloid was dead broke and so was Karakos.

The two men decided to visit Brazil to relax and possibly research some new music. While sipping caipirinhas, the pair encountered a new dance fad sweeping the clubs: The Lambada. This was a dance that had emerged from the bordellos of Pará, a mish-mash of styles as diverse as Carimbo, Merengue and Polka. It was sloppy and loose, but it gave young people an excuse to grind against each other—something that never goes out of style.

Karakos and Lorsac immediately went out and purchased all of the Lambada music they could find, then took those tapes home to France. But rather than trying to sign any of these artists, the two men had an idea. What if they just recorded it themselves? They assembled a session band—mostly comprised of African musicians, plus the Brazilian singer Loalwa Braz—and named the project Kaoma. Within a few weeks, Kaoma had an album ready to go.

Unusually for an unknown band, Lorsac managed to sign a few sponsorship deals before the record came out. Orangina gave them some money (which is why the drink is featured in the video) and TV channel TF1 included it in their sports coverage. ‘Lambada’ quickly achieved Song Of The Summer status across France, and then took over the Mediterranean resorts. Like a stubborn STI, holidaymakers carried it back to their home countries later that autumn.

Much like Golan and Globus’s Breakin’, this was a huge underdog victory, and a major money-spinner. Only problem was, Karakos and Lorsac never bothered finding out who wrote any of the Lambada songs they’d covered. They assumed the original artists would never come forward. When asked who wrote the songs, they said they did.

6. Estar com ele aonde for

Lambada was taking off in the States around the time that Golan and Globus’s movies were about to hit the cinemas. Potentially, one of those movies could have captured public interest and made a modest profit.

But Golan and Globus weren’t in this for modest profits. They were driven by spite, a bitter desire to crush their former partner.

Both men managed to score cruical victories in the run-up to release. Globus registered the name Lambada and successfully blocked Golan from including that word in the title of his movie. Golan reluctantly named his picture The Forbidden Dance, although the posters included a clarifing tagline “The Forbidden Dance…is The Lambada!”)

Golan managed to negoitate exlusive rights to Kaoma’s song, which was insperable from the public’s understanding of the Lambada. Without the hit song, Globus was reduced to using generic Latin-flavoured beats for his dance scenes.

Still, everything else was in favour of Globus’s Lambada. The movie was slated for release on May 4th, 1990, less than six months after Golan started work on his movie. There was no way he could get a movie out in that timeframe.

At the start of 1990, Golan announced that not only would The Forbidden Dance match Lambada‘s release data, it would actually appear a month earlier, on April 6th. Globus immediately fired back, saying that actually Lambada would release on March 16th. Golan said, “Game on”, and scheduled his film for the same day.

Both movies went into hyperdrive, almost breaking the people involved. The Forbidden Dance screenplay was written in ten days; Lambada started doing post-production while the crew were still shooting. In the Electric Dreams documentary, the Lambada cast confessed why that films ends with such a lifeless dance scene. Everyone involved was so exhausted that they could barely stand up. nevermind do the Lambada.

Was either movie any good? Short answer: lol, no, they’re terrible. Longer answer: they’re both terrible but in different ways.

Cannon Films’ Lambada is the more professional-looking of the two, as competently made as your average TV movie of the era. The story focuses on a fancy private school teacher called Kevin. By night, he’s an edgy underground dancer called Razor who is tutoring inner-city kids and helping them earn their GEDs. Melora Hardin (aka Jan from The Office) is a rich girl who discovers his secret life, while Shabba-Doo from the Breakin’ movies plays one of the working class kids. It’s quite a dull film with very little Lambada action. The climactic scene at the end involves… the kids taking a maths test.

Menahem Golan’s The Forbidden Dance is an absolute catastrophe that oftens strays into so-bad-it’s-good territory. Laura Harring (best known from David Lynch’s masterpiece, Mulholland Drive) plays an Amazonian princess who travels to Los Angeles to confront the evil developers threatening her tribe’s land. She befriends a young millionaire playboy and the two hatch a plan that involves going on America’s most popular TV show, which—and this is as insane as it sounds—a live dance competition hosted by Kid Creole & The Coconuts. They win the competition by dancing the lambada and plead their case to Kid Creole.

When Kid Creole hears about the rain forest, he says, “Wow, that sounds bad, they should stop doing ”, which causes capitalism to collapse instantly. The movie ends with a title card dedicating the film to “the preservation of the rain forest”. Actually, I take it back, The Forbidden Dance is amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKNQpHGjkrA

Lambada was the “winner” in box office terms, taking $4.2 million compared to The Forbidden Dance’s $1.8 million. Ultimately, both films were humiliating disasters. The Lambada craze was already fizzling out when the movies appeared, and the media reported it as a hubristic spat between two cousins who should know better.

Golan and Globus remained in the film industry and eventually reconciled, but this was the end of The Go-Go Boys as a major force in cinema. Cannon Films struggled on for a few more years, before finally and permanently going bankrupt in 1994.

7. Canção riso e dor, melodia de amor

We talked about ‘Agadoo’ a few weeks ago, a song that started as a Moroccan folk melody and went through many different forms before Black Lace recorded it. Now, imagine if Black Lace claimed they wrote ‘Agadoo’? Imagine how many lawsuits they’d face? They wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, becuase the opposing legal team could simply present the dozens of other recordings of ‘Agadoo’.

And yet, this is almost exactly what Karakos and Lorsac did with ‘Lambada’. The song’s melody is an old Andean folk tune, with one of the earlist recordings being a 1981 song by Los Kjarkas, a Bolivian folk band. Los Kjarkas wrote some new lyrics in Spanish and called it ‘Llorando se fue’ (‘They Left In Tears’).

In 1984, a Peruvian group called Cuarteto Continental recorded the song with a new, more upbeat arrangement, turning it into a party tune. This version was recorded multiple times before the Brazilian singer Marcia Ferreira translated it into Portuguese as ‘Chorando Se Foi’—exactly the same lyrics as those found in ‘Lambada’. And this wasn’t an obscure track. It sold millions of copies in Brazil.

Karakos and Lorsac essentially ripped off three songs: Los Kjarkas’s original song; Cuarteto Continental’s upbeat arrangement; and Marcia Ferreira’s Portuguese lyrics.

According to Karakos and Lorsac, this was all an accident. They’d recorded and released it without a songwriting credit. When the song began to take off, various chancers tried to claim they’d written it, while others took advantage of the confusion and released unauthorised cover versions.

But their solution was bonkers. They created a pseudonym—Chico de Oliveira—and credited the song to him. Karakos claimed that they’d kept planned to transfer authorship to they songs rightful owner, but they couldn’t find them.

The authors found them. Karakos and Lorsac were slapped with multiple lawsuits. Semac, the French music rights agency, suspended royalty payments until the matter was resolved. Le Monde did some in-depth investigative reports on the scandal and several voices accused the duo of colonial exploitation, framing them as a pair of modern-day Cortezes. In the end, they didn’t make any money from ‘Lambada’, and their reputations were left in tatters.

Kaoma did release a second album, this time with original material, but audiences wented two Lambada albums about as much as they wanted two Lambada movies. Like Golan and Globus, Karakos and Lorsac continued in the music business after the Lambada fiasco. Like their Israeli counterparts, they never again came close to their glory days.

8. Um momento que fica no ar

Lambada and The Forbidden Dance both claim that the Lambada was banned by the Brazilian government for being too sexy and dangerous, although that’s not remotely true. In fact, Lambada was wildly popular in mainstream nightclubs for a time, until audiences got bored of it. A nightclub in Sao Paolo held a “funeral” for the Lambada shortly before the movies came out; Brazilian youth moved onto other fads.

But it did turn out to be dangerous for the four men who invested the most money in it: Golan and Globus, and Karakos and Lorsac. All four of them took some crazy risks during their careers, and occasionally they created some great art. How weird that the Lambada was the rock they all perished on.

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