Costa! is a Dutch movie, dealing with summer loves in the sunny Spanish coastal city Salou. For the 2001 movie, young cineast Johan Nijenhuis recruited several popular boys and girls from the Dutch soap TV circuit. Costa! indeed is comparable to the level of the average soap series.
This is how the story goes: Young girl Janet (played by Georgina Verbaan) joins her sister and her friends on their holiday to Spain, although the other girls don't really like this because they think Janet is stupid and deters the boys. In Salou they end up in a discotheque called Costa!, where Rens (played by Daan Schuurmans) and Frida (Netherlands' most popular soap actress Katja Schuurman) work as proppers. Proppers are - as the movie clarifies - people who lure other young tourists to the discotheques, and take care of the dancing shows. The proppers are popular and every night it's party time in the discotheque as well as in bed for them. At least, the latter is suggested - unlike many other Dutch movies, viewers will see no explicit sex at all in Costa!.
At a dancing show, Frida bruises her ankle which causes Rens to take the shy Janet to the stage. She turns out to be a remarkably good dancer. When Rens wants to get rid of Frida for the yearly propper dance competition, this clearly causes jealousy and anger.
The story is sweet as honey, the music is below average and there's nothing sunny about the movie. Nijenhuis directed popular soap operas Goede Tijden Slechte Tijden and Westenwind for years, but doesn't know how to make a movie. In his attempts to lower the bar in the hope to attract a young audience, he went way too far. The actors are sweet, prude and moralistic, and worse is that they have to act here - I mean really pretend as if you're someone else and you believe in everything your character thinks and does. Especially for Katja Schuurman this proves to be too hard an assignment. IMDB's 4.9 out of 10 speaks for itself. If you really want to see a good Dutch movie, go rent Turks Fruit, De Poolse Bruid or Father and Daughter.
According to IMDB, the cast was billed as follows:
The official website can be found at http://www.costamovie.com/. The movie was followed by a TV series under the same name. It still pollutes Dutch television.