Rooftops

A love struck roof-dwelling combat air dancer battles criminals in a Manhattan ghetto.

From a decade of dance and pop, pre CGI, when the safety of actors doing stunts wasn't priority comes Robert Wise's Rooftops...

With plenty of F' bombs, a few chases, fights and some moves from Breakin' and The Electric Boogaloo, the tone is inconsistent, it unrealistically sugar-coats the grim realities facing homeless teenagers. Wise echoes the atmosphere of New York reminiscent of like of The Equalizer TV series, Death Wish 2 and Wild Thing to name a few. Writers Allan A. Goldstein, Tony Mark and Terrence Brennan touch on abuse, gang crime and other serious problems of the day, many of which are still issues.

The pacing is slow pace and plot thin but the cast are more than competent, leads Troy Byer Jason Gedrick are solid. Alexis Cruz is notable. However, the real star of the show is the location. With a fitting score and soundtrack, Wise offers the New York streets, abandoned buildings and 80s skyline. Showing the contrasting rich to the ghetto poor.

Worth a watch if only from a nostalgia or time capsule perspective.

Awful songs, crummy acting, Troy Beyer the babe, "combat dancing", living in a water tower, this one's got everything for the bad movie 80's fanatic. I rented it once, loved it, & bought it off E-bay for $1. Worth every penny.

One a scale of 1 to 5 stars, with one star being the lowest & 5 stars being the highest, I rate this one an A-. . .

I have watched this movie over and over since it first came out. I was fifteen and even then, I knew it was cheesy. It had such great potential and I constantly rewrite the script in my head. The Capoeira ruined what could have been a good drama. I loved the fact that it was shot on location. Too bad that the characters were underdeveloped. It's like they wrote a first draft of a script then made the movie right away. At fifteen I could have written a better script!Some scenes and dialog seemed to come out of nowhere and you were left with a lot of unanswered questions. And was it just me, or did it seem like Lobo was sexually attracted to his cousin? "Elena's grown into some kind of woman!" And the way he was always touching her. Would have an interesting plot twist, Elena working for her drug dealing cousin who is also a perv. Too bad they missed the mark on this one.

I have the sneaking suspicion that the the story behind the movie "The Ring" , wherein people die after watching a video, came to someone after watching this movie. My own VCR exploded in protest while I was watching it. It probably saved my life. It is the rarest of films, one in which absolutely none of the elements work. If you intentionally set out to make the worst movie in the world, I doubt you could equal the unholy "Rooftops". I have a method I use for measuring how bad a particular work is. I call it the David Lee Roth factor. Simply ask yourself "Would this be any worse if David Lee Roth were somehow involved?" In the case of "Rooftops", the answer is a resounding "No!" Believe you me, you don't want to see or hear anything that David Lee Roth can't ruin.

First of all, why are most of the reviews on here from the early 2000's? Just sayin'. Anyhoo, I just watched this on Tubi 'cause I'm a sucka for '80s cheese and this movie is EPIC! It's got a b-movie script and mostly nobodies in the cast, but the direction and overall look and feel are first-rate. I guess it was directed by the guy who did West Side Story; it's kinda the same storyline, with a star-crossed love story between a dude who lives in an abandoned watertank and a girl who reluctantly works as a lookout for her crack-dealing cousin. There's a fair amount of that weird Brazilian dance-fighting as well as some parkour and the requisite terrible soundtrack. But the sense of time and place is great, and the acting is pretty good. Would make an excellent double feature with the amazing "Delivery Boys".