Ridiculous Female Fantasy

Rating: 1/10 (25 October 2017)

This nostalgic look at a time that never was has mousy Jewish girl (Jennifer Grey) about to go off to college but going off with her family to vacation at a Catskills resort and finding love with a sleazy and vapid dancer (Patrick Swayze).
Nothing rings true in this story. The mix of vintage music with new music doesn't work. The resort staff that does "dirty dancing" in their private quarters is moronic. The acting is horrid.
The narrator waxes nostalgic in the opening, telling of that time before the Kennedy murder and before the Beatles. We then get shown people who also would not have been employed by a Jewish resort. People didn't talk this way in 1963 and they didn't act this way in 1963.
Grey plays "Baby" Houseman, a nice Jewish girl without a Jewish name. She's taken with Johnny ... they're always named Johnny ... a street kid who can dance as well as he can mince. Swayze has the sex appeal of cold mashed potatoes.His preening and posturing is supposed to pass for machismo but he's less butch than Grey is. The dancing that wows the fans would get the boot on any local talent show.
Caught up in this mush are Jack Weston as the resort owner, Jerry Orbach as the Jewish daddy, Kelly Bishop as the vacant mother, Jane Brucker as the apparently retarded older daughter. Cynthia Rhodes as the knocked-up dancer, Wayne Knight as a comic, Paula Trueman as a geriatric kleptomaniac, Max Cantor as Robbie the seducer, Lonny Price as the smarmy grandson of the owner, and Charles "Honi" Coles as the bandleader.
Most of the cars are too old, the hair styles are wrong, and the Catskills resort was actually filmed in Virginia and North Carolina and looks nothing like Upstate New York.
The dance ending is ridiculous with Swayze leaping offstage into the audience and gyrating in a group dance, and they all know the steps! Apparently Baby lands her Johnny ... a relationship that should last all of two weeks.