21 year old Zoe (Romina D'Ugo) is an aspiring dancer working in a flooring store until she can find her dream job. Of course, it's hard to get a break in the dancing business in L.A. since there are already so many dancers there. Zoe is still determined though. She and her boyfriend Chris (Adam T. Brooks) go to try out for a dance video for Malika (Brooklyn Sudano), who started out as their friend but success has made her popular and not very nice. Malika chooses Chris but cuts Zoe, even though she's the best one there. Anyway, life goes on. While out at a club where her best friend Steph (Jennifer Miller) is the DJ, Zoe meets a rich club owner, Michael (David Giuntoli) and pitches him an idea about opening a disco. He's unsure of the idea, but decides to give her a chance anyway. He tells her that he's got a new place opening soon. He'll hire her to coordinate the opening party and if that works out well, then she's got her disco.
With all this new excitement though, everything is very busy in Zoe's life. Steph is going to take care of the music of course, but Zoe's got to find dancers and teach them disco. She turns to her friends first because she knows they'll come through for her. Zoe also gets her mom to teach her more dance moves as her mom was an aspiring dancer during the disco era. With the support of her friends, hopefully Zoe is going to be able to pull this venture off and deal with betrayal at the same time.
I realize that this description sounds like the plot of every dance movie except usually it's a dance competition in the end instead of a club opening. That's because Turn the Beat Around is pretty much exactly like every dance movie I've seen. They even have the prerequisite ballerina, Nina (Natalli Reznik), who wants to leave ballet for a style of dance that she chooses instead of one that her parents chose for her.
Overall, there are major problems with Turn the Beat Around. You can tell that it was made for TV, as the commercial changes are very choppy. Even most major TV shows now make it so that the commercial changes are relatively flawless so that when you watch it on DVD, you don't notice them. I would have expected this movie to be the same. There is a "Making of" that is pretty good and some interesting deleted scenes, though the overall plot is unimaginative and feels very contrived. But there's no law saying that a movie has to be unique. Turn the Beat Around isn't the most original movie out, but it's about disco. Just like disco, the point isn't to be the most unique, the point of the movie is to be fun. It is a simple, feel-good movie. If that's what you're looking for, you'll not be let down.
