1980 Week: The Apple

          Highly entertaining documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014) explores, in part, the cultural dissonance that resulted whenever Cannon’s founders, Israelis Menaham Golan and Yoram Globus, attempted to create movies for the international market without realizing how idiomatically they approached storytelling. As a small example of this nuance, consider a moment in the batshit-crazy musical The Apple, which Golan directed. Entering a messy apartment, a landlady exclaims: “What happened in here, a pogrom?” Or consider The Apple itself, a staggeringly wrong-headed epic using a story about the disco-era music business as an allegory for the fall of Adam and Eve from God’s grace. Yes, the apple at the heart of the story—represented, per the film’s bigger-is-better aesthetic, by a gigantic prop the size of a watermelon—is a symbol of man’s eternal sin.

          Don’t get the idea, however, that The Apple is purely high-minded, because the picture also contains one of the filthiest original songs ever composed for a motion picture. That’s how it goes with The Apple, and that’s how it went with most of the terrible movies that Golan and Globus unleashed on the world during their decades-long reign of cinematic terror. More than just bad taste, chintzy budgets, and grade-Z actors, the Cannon Films brand was synonymous with misguided storytelling. The Apple is perhaps the apex of Cannon leaving human reality behind to venture into parts unknown.

          Set in the future, the film imagines a bizarre scenario wherein a music-publishing company becomes the dominant political force in the world, controlling the economy through the popularity of its rock stars. Naturally, the head of the publishing company, Boogaloo (Vladek Sheybal), is the devil figure in this parable. His victims are the story’s Adam and Eve characters, sensitive and wholesome singer-songwriters Alphie (George Gilmour) and Bibi (Catherine Mary Stewart), who hail from the random location of Moosejaw, Canada. When the story begins, Alphie and Bibi try performing their ballad about love, “The Universal Melody,” during Univsion’s famous song contest. (In real life, the contest introduced the world to ABBA, so there’s that.) Boogaloo tampers with speakers during the duo’s performance, ensuring that his prefab band wins the contest. Then Boogaloo tempts Alphie and Bibi with the promise of a recording contract. Bibi accepts the offer—a moment dramatized by a dream sequence set in hell, complete with the aforementioned giant apple—but Alphie does not.

          Thereafter, the movie tracks Bibi’s degrading transformation into a slutty pop star. Meanwhile, Alphie mopes about the cost of integrity. Eventually, Boogaloo decrees that everyone in the world must wear a “BIM sticker,” emblematic of his publishing company’s brand name, or else risk arrest. Alphie gets pulled into Boogaloo’s seductive web, only to help Bibi escape so they can find God—excuse me, “Mr. Topps” (Joss Ackland)—hiding in a hippie commune. It’s all much weirder than it sounds, and the whole thing is presented like a bad ’70s TV special: think shiny costumes, sexualized dance numbers, and star filters. The most staggering moment involves the original song “Coming,” a tune cooed by one of Boogaloo’s acolytes—a sexy African-American chanteuse—on the occasion of luring Alphie into bed. As she writhes atop Alphie, she moans these lyrics: “Make it harder and harder and faster and faster, and when you think you can’t keep it up, I’ll take you deeper and deeper and tighter and tighter, and drain every drop of your love.”

          Is it hot in here, or is it just me?

          Golan and his collaborators employ seemingly every musical style imaginable, as if the notion of a guiding aesthetic never occurred to them; The Apple has ballet, tap, reggae, and more. Adding to the weirdness is the international cast. Stewart, appearing in her first film, is an actual Canadian who sounds like she’s from the American heartland, while Gilmour, who never appeared in another film, sounds indecipherably European. Playing the devil character is a Polish actor who sounds Israeli, and playing the God character is an English actor who sounds German. Plus, for every song that’s more or less palatable—despite its salaciousness, “Coming” is catchy—there’s a tune that punishes the eardrums. It’s best to avoid deciphering The Apple, instead letting the monumental vulgarity wash over you. If you’re a real masochist, try watching this one alongside 1980’s other misbegotten disco epics, Can’t Stop the Music and Xanadu.

The Apple: FREAKY

Disco Fever (1978)

How much do titles matter? Let’s use this low-budget music movie as a case study. Although the picture has disco elements, including the principal location of a nightclub and a subplot about the rise of a wannabe disco singing star, the flick is not actually about disco. Rather, it’s about a nightclub owner who exploits a former teen idol, using his notoriety to gain publicity. While there isn’t a single original idea in the picture, the acting is adequate and the general arc of the piece is more or less satisfying in an empty-calories sort of way. (Anyone who’s ever encountered a story about an artist being asked to sell out will be able to predict the entire storyline.) Disco Fever even has something akin to credibility, since the main character is played by Fabian Forte, a real-life former teen idol. So here’s the problem with the title. Anyone buying a ticket for something called Disco Fever would, naturally, expect something in the vein of the previous year’s Saturday Night Fever. Thus, consumers willing to support any old movie with disco themes were hoodwinked, and the filmmakers who generated a borderline passable showbiz melodrama were precluded from reaching moviegoers who might be interested in the actual content of the picture. No big loss either way, but still. In any event, a couple of peculiar things about Disco Fever are worth mentioning. Famed radio personality and sometimes actor Casey Kasem plays the teen idol’s manager—making this the second of two movies in which Kasem served as Forte’s foil, the first being Soul Hustler (1973). Additionally, George Barris, the self-proclaimed “King of the Customizers” whose main claim to fame was creating the Batmobile for the 1960s Batman TV show, not only appears as himself in this movie, but he also wrote the story and served as one of the project’s executive producers. Holy Random Credits, Batman!

Disco Fever: LAME

Disco 9000 (1976)

“He’s got a plan that makes him king of boogie-land.” Or so we’re told about protagonist Fass Black in the title song of Disco 9000. Sometimes marketed under the title Fass Black, this tedious blaxploitation flick explores the life of an entrepreneur who owns a successful discotheque on the Sunset Strip, as well as a record label that pumps out a steady stream of dancefloor hits. The anemic plot has a crime hook, because out-of-town gangsters try to muscle into the LA market by intimidating Fass into playing records from mob-owned labels at his club, the top influencer in the SoCal disco scene. Meanwhile, Fass juggles relationships with his wife, his mistress, and various other women. Yes, it’s another spin on the “black kingpin” trope so common to blaxploitation flicks, and neither director D’Urville Martin (better known as an actor) nor writer Roland S. Jefferson M.D. (whose medical credential appears onscreen) generates much heat. The narrative is plodding and predictable, with large chunks of screen time devoted to unimaginatively filmed dance performances. Worse, the only character with any flair is Fass’ pugnacious sidekick, Midget (played by famed dancer Harold Nicholas). Considering the colorful milieu of a nightclub, D’Urville’s lack of cinematic dynamism is galling. Viewers are shown the same drab cutaways of neon lights again and again, and the soundtrack is just as repetitive—after watching Disco 9000, you’ll need a long reprieve from hearing Johnnie Taylor’s slinky hit “Disco Lady,” which is featured way too many times. Oh, and there’s a reason why leading man John Poole’s career never caught fire after he played Fass Black. “Bland” is too generous a word for describing his screen presence. He delivers a performance as stiff and unoriginal as the movie surrounding him.

Disco 9000: LAME

Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula (1979)

          Blending comedy, disco music, sex, and vampirism with some of the worst acting ever captured on film, Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula is entertainingly abysmal. Not a single frame of the movie works as intended, and that’s what makes watching Nocturna so perversely pleasurable. Cowritten and coproduced by Vietnamese belly-dancing star (!) Nai Bonet, who plays the leading role and spends a fair amount of screen time slathering her own nude body with bath oil, Nocturna is a vanity project gone terribly, terribly wrong.

          Sharing many elements with the George Hamilton comedy Love at First Bite (1979), which was filmed around the same time as Nocturna, this movie opens in Transylvania, where Dracula (John Carradine) encounters difficulty adjusting to disco-era society. Things have gotten so bad that parts of his castle have been opened to the public as a resort called Hotel Transylvania, which, naturally, includes a disco. Yet instead of following the famous bloodsucker’s adventures, as happens in Love at First Bite, this movie tracks the count’s lissome granddaughter, Nocturna (Bonet).

          While dancing in the disco with an American stud named Jimmy (Antony Hamilton), Nocturna discovers that she casts a reflection—quite a surprise for a vampire. Realizing that she becomes mortal on the dancefloor, Nocturna follows Jimmy to New York City, where she looks for a way to live as a human permanently. A peeved Dracula soon follows her, hoping to lure Nocturna back to the homeland.

          Nocturna is filled with cringe-inducing one-liners and puns, to say nothing of stupid scatological references. As Dracula muses at one point: “If I’m alive, why am I here, but if I’m dead, why do I have to wee-wee?” (Elsewhere, Dracula proclaims, “All the ladies would say I was hung like a walrus!”) Bonet is a spectacularly bad actress, smiling lifelessly through every scene as if she’s a Price Is Right model presenting a washer-dryer set, and her line deliveries are so empty that they’re unintentionally hilarious. Describing an ecstatic moment, she says “It loved it—it was fantastic” with all the energy of a postal worker explaining how much it will cost to mail an envelope.

          Similarly, Bonet’s dancing is dull and unimaginative, which becomes a considerable problem whenever the movie stops cold to watch her twirl repetitively across a dancefloor. Even the aforementioned nude scene has a strange quality, because it seems powered by exhibitionism rather than exploitation. Clearly, Bonet wanted the world’s attention just as badly as the world wanted to ignore her. Still, she did this to herself, so adventurous viewers can hate-watch Nocturna free of guilt.

          Plus, every so often, the germ of a real idea pokes through the smog of ineptitude. For instance, Nocturna hooks up with a gang of NYC vampires who bitch about modern problems, such as the trouble of finding victims whose blood isn’t tainted by processed food. This particular angle leads to a campy scene of a black vampire, dressed like a pimp, offering powdered blood—which prompts an affronted woman to say, “I’d rather suck than sniff any day.” Wow. To complete the effect, throw in a slumming Yvonne De Carlo, as Dracula’s old flame, a pulsing disco soundtrack featuring tunes by artists including Gloria Gaynor and Vickie Sue Robinson, and a supporting actor who does a solid Boris Karloff impersonation. Can a movie be amazing and atrocious at the same time? If the movie’s title is Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula, the answer is yes.

Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula: LAME

Skatetown, U.S.A. (1979)

          Running down the cast of Skatetown, U.S.A. should explain why the movie is such a glorious train wreck—that is, if the title didn’t do the job already. Happy Days kid Scott Baio plays Richie, a fast-talking hustler who wants to help his best friend, Adonis-like blond Stan (Greg Bradford), and Stan’s nymphomaniac sister, Susan (Maureen McCormick from The Brady Bunch), win a roller-disco championship. The team’s destination is Skatetown, U.S.A., a rink located on the Santa Monica Pier and operated by stressed-out comedian/entrepreneur Harvey (Flip Wilson), who spends most of his time keeping his diminutive second-in-commend, Jimmy (Billy Barty), from hitting on a voluptuous ticket-seller played by ’70s TV starlet Judy Landers. Meanwhile, an evil roller-skating gang led by Ace (Patrick Swayze, in his embarrassing movie debut) tries to rig the context, intimidating Harvey with threats of violence and sending gang member Frankey (Ron Palillo from Welcome, Back Kotter) to distract Susan. Yes, that means Skatetown, U.S.A. includes scenes of Horshack and Marcia Brady necking in a convertible.
          Amid this nonsense, grade-Z comedy actors perform stupid bits, rocker Dave Mason appears periodically to perform tunes including “Feelin’ Alright,” and a DJ character called “The Wizard” (Denny Johnston)—who wears some sort of gigantic albino-Afro wig—uses magic laser beams to make roller skaters appear. Oh, and most of the film’s screen time is consumed by endless roller-disco scenes, including tightly choreographed routines by ensembles, as well as eroticized duets such as Swazye’s bondage-themed dance set to a mediocre cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb.” Need it be said that Skatetown, U.S..A. concludes with a Rebel Without a Cause-style chicken run between Ace and Stan, who zoom down the Santa Monica Pier on skates equipped with rockets? Or that Wilson plays a second role, as his own character’s wife, in drag? Notorious as one of the few ’70s movies with major actors never to be released on any form of home video, Skatetown, U.S.A. is staggeringly awful from the first frame to the last. Although clearly made with a decent budget and featuring some impressive dancing, the movie is atrocious in terms of acting, direction, and writing. And yet that’s why it’s both weirdly compelling and something of a cult favorite among devotees of cinematic misfires.

Skatetown, U.S.A.: LAME

The Stud (1978)

          Disco-era smut that tries for shock value but merely achieves trashiness, The Stud was adapted from one of Jackie Collins’ myriad bestselling novels about the sex lives of rich people, and it stars the author’s sister, Joan Collins, as a bitchy nymphomaniac who chews up and spits out the handsome young man she takes on as her employee and her lover. If Joan Collins’ character represents life in the fast lane, then leading man Oliver Tobias’ character represents discarded junk on the side of the road. Despite giving some lip service to character development and moral consequences, The Stud is nothing more than a glossy survey of attractive people conniving and copulating. It’s also about as enjoyable as an STD. The characters in the movie are uniformly horrible to each other, the “glamorous” settings seem devoid of genuine pleasure, and director Quentin Masters’ weird penchant for fisheye lenses—combined with the disjointed musical underscore—give The Stud the flavor of a horror movie. If the goal was to make something erotic, then the team behind The Stud failed miserably.

          Joan Collins, icy and vampish, plays Fontaine Khaled, trophy wife of a Middle Eastern businessman. For amusement, she spends her husband’s money on a discotheque that she uses as her personal playground, and she hires Tony Blake (Tobias) to manage the club, with the understanding that he should be sexually available to her at all times. Whenever she’s with her jet-set friends, Fontaine flaunts her boy toy, even complaining at one point that while he possesses stamina, he lacks carnal sophistication: “Do you know when I first met him, Tony thought the 69 was a bottle of Scotch?” Despite enjoying the perks of his kept-man lifestyle, Tony bristles at Fontaine’s humiliating treatment, and he dallies with other women. Things really spiral when—wait for it!—Tony meets Fontaine’s pretty stepdaughter, Alex (Emma Jacobs), who is as virginal as Fontaine is slatternly. Sensing that Tony is drifting from her, Fontaine offers Tony’s services to her friends, female and male alike, during a lengthy but uninteresting orgy scene that involves drugs, a massive indoor swimming pool, and Collins flying through the air on an ivy-coated swing while wearing lingerie. (During the orgy, one of Fontaine’s gay male friends dismisses women in general with the memorable line, “As much as I appreciate the extra orifice, they bore me.”)

          About the only palatable sequences in the picture are long, plotless montages of disco dancing set to such slinky hits as “Every 1’s a Winner” and “Love Is Like Oxygen.” Nonetheless, someone must have bought tickets to see The Stud, because the Collins sisters collaborated on a quickie sequel, The Bitch, which was released in England in 1979 and slithered into the American market some time afterward. Both The Stud and The Bitch found new life on cable and home video after Joan Collins made a smash on American television playing Alexis Carrington Colby on the nighttime soap Dynasty (1981-1989).

The Stud: LAME

1980 Week: Can’t Stop the Music & Xanadu

          Since disco was already dying by the time these two spectacularly bad dance-themed movies were released, it’s not fair to say that either picture killed disco. Nonetheless, the sleazy Can’t Stop the Music and the wholesome Xanadu certainly inflicted wounds. Starring the Village People, Can’t Stop the Music is perplexing right from the first frame, because the opening-credits sequence features Steve Guttenberg roller-skating through New York City, in a split-screen effect, as he listens to the Village People on his personal radio and as the credits reveal the motley crew assembled for the movie. Beyond Guttenberg, the cast includes athlete Bruce Jenner and sexpot Valerie Perrine. Stranger still, the picture was directed by Nancy Walker, best known for playing greasy-spoon waitress “Rosie” in ’70s commercials for Bounty paper towels.

          Can’t Stop the Music purports to tell the story of the Village People’s formation, and like everything else related to the ridiculous vocal group behind “Macho Man” and “Y.M.C.A.,” Can’t Stop the Music avoids the elephant in the room—the fact that the Village People coyly repackaged homoerotica for mainstream consumption. Can’t Stop the Music is outrageously sexualized, featuring scenes in gyms and saunas and swimming pools—there’s even the occasional glimpse of a penis, despite the film’s PG rating. The five singers in the Village People give terrible acting performances, as does Jenner, and the whole movie is cut so fast that it feels like a hallucination. Weirdest of all, perhaps, is the unrelentingly upbeat tone—Can’t Stop the Music is like an old Garland-Rooney “let’s put on a show” picture, only set in a bathhouse.

          Xanadu is just as exuberant, and occasionally just as surreal, but it lacks the subversive quality of Can’t Stop the Music. Instead, Xanadu is an infantile phantasmagoria. However, I must confess to loving the movie’s soundtrack album, featuring songs by Electric Light Orchestra and the film’s leading lady, Olivia Newton-John. (True confession: Xanadu was the first LP I bought with my own money.) Michael Beck, a long way from The Warriors (1979), plays Sonny, an L.A. artist who paints billboard-sized versions of album covers. While roller-skating around Santa Monica one afternoon, Sonny meets the beguiling Kira (Newton-John), who turns out to be one of the Muses from Greek mythology. Kira provides magical inspiration to both Sonny and aging song-and-dance man Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly) as the three contrive to build a roller-disco palace called Xanadu. That is, until Zeus decides Kira must return to Olympus.

          In the course of telling its silly story, Xanadu toggles between cinematic styles with great abandon. There’s an animated sequence, lots of special effects, endless roller-disco jams, and a bizarre mash-up number combining a WWII-style big band performance and a guitar-heavy throwdown by L.A. pop-punkers The Tubes. As with Can’t Stop the Music, the genuinely terrible Xanadu is best experienced with either abject disbelief or ironic amusement. The only unassailable aspect of the film is the leading lady’s appearance, because Newton-John was at the apex of her girl-next-door sexiness. Amazingly, Xanadu has enjoyed a long afterlife, even spawning a Broadway musical. Turns out you really can’t stop the music—no matter how hard you try.

          FYI, the collective awfulness of Can’t Stop the Music and Xanadu led to the creation of the Golden Raspberry Awards, which honor cinema’s worst achievements.

Can’t Stop the Music: FREAKY

Xanadu: FREAKY

Disco Godfather (1979)

Rudy Ray Moore, a cult-favorite black comic known for his outrageously filthy routines, ascended to B-movie stardom with the pimp saga Dolemite (1975) and its sequel, The Human Tornado (1976), then continued his onslaught of schlocky cinema with The Monkey Hu$tle (1977) and this weird action/drama. In Disco Godfather, Moore stars as Tucker, an ex-cop who grooves on his new career as a discotheque DJ until his favorite nephew, Bucky (Julius Carry), gets mixed up with angel dust. Thereafter, Tucker shifts into ass-kicking mode so he can take down the operation of local dealer Stringer Ray (Hawthorne James). Disco Godfather feels like at least three different movies jammed together. The opening stretch, featuring endless footage of disco dancers doing tricks involving acrobatics and roller skates, is amateurish and confusing but basically lighthearted. Then, once people start having bad angel-dust experiences, the movie kicks into a trippy mode with clunky “hallucination” imagery (generally comprising actors in monster costumes reaching toward the camera). Finally, the picture becomes a full-on blaxploitation action saga, complete with kung fu brawls. In its closing scenes, the movie tries to get heavy because Stringer Ray captures Tucker and pumps our hero full of angel dust, sending him into a crazy series of freakouts and hallucinations. The effect, unfortunately, is far more comic than harrowing. Per the Rudy Ray Moore norm, everything in Disco Godfather is borderline incoherent. Few plot elements make sense, the performances are across-the-board terrible, and the editing is so choppy the movie has a fever-dream quality. Worst of all is the dialogue, which wobbles between formality and hipness. “As you can see, to be a member of the disco squad, you have to be funky and get down.” “I’m personally going to come down on the suckers that’s producing this shit.” “Get the names of all the people who would like to go on a crusade against angel dust.” Especially when considered in the context of Moore’s supersized ego—every single member of the cast and crew is grouped in the credits beneath the heading “Assistants to Mr. Rudy Ray Moore”—the rampant incompetence of Disco Godfather can only be described as astounding.

Disco Godfather: LAME

Love at First Bite (1979)

          Casting perpetually tanned smoothie George Hamilton as a pasty-faced vampire was such a droll bit of comic inspiration—and Hamilton’s ensuing performance was so unexpectedly delightful—that it’s easy to savor fond memories of Love at First Bite if one encountered the movie during its original release and avoided it thereafter. Alas, revisiting the film dispels those fond memories quickly. Hamilton is indeed quite funny, and his costars pour on the charm to infuse their thin characterizations with vitality, but the film’s comedy is so broad (and, at times, so racist) that sensible viewers will cringe as often as they chuckle. On top of insipid one-liners like “I’m going out for a bite to drink,” the picture includes awful sequences with featured players Sherman Hemsley and Isabel Sanford (better known as TV’s The Jeffersons) lampooning African-American patois.

          Anyway, here’s the good news: Hamilton, Richard Benjamin, Arte Johnson, and Susan Saint James look like they’re having a blast delivering silly jokes, so their cheerfulness makes long stretches of the movie palatable. The plot involves Count Dracula (Hamilton) relocating to New York City with his psychotic henchman Renfield (Johnson). Once in Manhattan, Dracula courts neurotic model Cindy Sondheim (Saint James), who, of course, happens to be romantically entangled with shrink Dr. Jeffrey Rosenberg (Benjamin), a descendant of Dracula’s old nemesis Abraham Van Helsing. And so it goes from there: The vampire woos the model, the doctor becomes a monster hunter, and Renfield eats bugs.

          The tone of the picture is set perfectly during the opening Transylvania scenes, because when Hamilton makes his entrance in a spooky castle to the accompaniment of baying wolves, he coos a funny twist on an old Bela Lugosi line: “Children of the night—shut up!” The gimmick is that Dracula is tired of the same old routine, so he’s eager to try new things like dancing in a disco; sure enough, the romantic boogie that Hamilton and Saint James perform to Alicia Bridges’ slinky hit “I Love the Night Life” is a highlight.

          Had director Stan Dragoti and the film’s writers been able to maintain a consistent balance of clever jokes and romance, Love at First Bite could have become an offbeat gem. Instead, it’s a mixed bag of fun sequences and stupid discursions, with the clunker gags outnumbering the successful zingers. Still, there’s a reason this was among the few unqualified triumphs of Hamilton’s career—since the actor conveys ironic self-awareness from start to finish, he’s impossible to dislike even when the movie around him is very easy to dislike.

Love at First Bite: FUNKY

Roller Boogie (1979)

The title of this low-budget romantic drama explains its minor curiosity value, since the fad of roller-skating in discos was so purely ’70s that watching a feature-length celebration of the activity is like slipping into a time machine. Having said that, the movie is as interesting as the roller-boogie fad itself, which is to say that after about two minutes of watching attractive young people zip around in polyester and spandex, all curiosity has been satiated. Linda Blair, caught in her awkward transition from juvenile stardom to grown-up roles, stars as Terry, a teen musical prodigy from a wealthy Beverly Hills family who digs slumming with the skaters on the Venice Beach boardwalk. There, she meets gifted skater Bobby (Jim Bray), who becomes her roller-boogie tutor and, later, her wrong-side-of-the-tracks lover. Complicating their lives are the mobsters who want Venice entrepreneur Jammer (Sean McClory) to sell his roller rink so they can redevelop the property. Soon enough, Terry and Bobby become the leaders of a group of kids striving to expose the bad guys and save their favorite hangout. In other words, to call Roller Boogie vapid would be to unfairly raise expectations. Lest we forget, the dude calling the shots on Roller Boogie was none other than cinematic bottom-feeder Mark L. Lester. From start to finish, the acting is as bad as the writing, the picture’s attempts at comic relief are awful, and the roller-boogie sequences drag on forever. It’s also jarring that some of the skating vignettes are highly choreographed, while others are documentary-style montages of kids doin’ their thing on the roller-rink track. Bray, a real-life skating champion, offers impressive athleticism but nothing else, while the nubile Blair fills out her barely-there outfits more ably than she fleshes out her whiny characterization.

Roller Boogie: LAME

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

          Saturday Night Fever is more than just the movie with John Travolta wearing a white suit and dancing to the music of the Bee Gees. It’s also an insightful study of ambition and desperation, and a gritty depiction of life in the working-class neighborhoods of New York City. So while the storyline is melodramatic and some of the musical sequences go on too long, Travolta’s performance is one of the most iconic acting turns of the ’70s, and the movie is filled with moments that have become ingrained into the texture of cinema history. Norman Wexler adapted the script from a New York magazine article titled “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” which, ironically, author Nik Cohn later admitted he fabricated, so it’s not as if Saturday Night Fever has any claim to factual accuracy; what the movie offers instead is a palpable sense that its relatable characters are obsessed with scoring on the dancefloor as a means of escaping what they perceive as the suffocating confines of “normal” life.

          Travolta stars as Tony Manero, a twentysomething paint-store drone whose life is headed straight to blue-collar mediocrity except for when he unleashes his prodigious talent for disco dancing. On the multicolored floor of the Odyssey nightclub, he’s a god. Tony’s abilities draw him into a fractious relationship with an ambitious female counterpart, Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), and he’s fascinated by the fact that she’s even better at putting on big-city airs than he is, so he studies with her to improve his dance technique, to polish his faux refinement, and to make time with her in order to prove his Neanderthal manhood. Watching dim-bulb Tony realize that there’s more to life than pretending to be a big shot is compelling, and the subplot depicting Tony’s abusive treatment of a simple neighborhood girl (Donna Pescow) adds dark colors to the characterization. The sequences depicting Tony and his buddies prowling for women are especially vivid, with the streetwise dudes spewing foul-mouthed boasts and indulging impulses so primal that they’re forever walking the line between big talk and big, violent action.

           Travolta gives his career-best performance, matching youthful swagger with genuine pathos, and he’s credible even when the movie gets overwrought. However it’s the dance scenes that make the film legendary, and for the most part they don’t disappoint; director John Badham’s exciting visual contributions include the up-and-down camera moves that follow Travolta’s every gyration during his show-stopping routine set to “You Should Be Dancing.” For the whole Saturday Night Fever experience, by the way, avoid the truncated PG-rated version that Paramount released in 1978 so younger viewers could see the movie, because only the R-rated original has the full impact.

Saturday Night Fever: RIGHT ON

Thank God It’s Friday (1978)

          Given disco’s lowly status in the pantheon of pop-music genres, it will come as no surprise to say that disco didn’t inspire very many good movies; in fact it’s hard to think of another disco-themed classic besides Saturday Night Fever (1977). But even within this expectation-lowering context, some of the most prominent disco flicks are atrocious, with dippy storylines, moronic characters, and shoddy production values. Those three shortcomings are on ample display throughout Thank God It’s Friday, a simultaneously overstuffed and underdeveloped attempt to mimic the excitement of one crazy night at a hot discotheque. Several characters converge on the Zoo nightclub for a dance contest featuring a live performance by the Commodores, with half of the characters eager to prove their worth on the dancefloor and the other hot to strut their skills in the bedroom.
          What should be flashy and sexy is instead dull and laborious, because the filmmakers focus on milking uninspired running gags instead of trying to develop colorful characters. Valerie Lansburg and Terri Nunn play ditzy teenagers who want the contest prize money so they can buy tickets to a Kiss concert. Mark Lonow and Andrea Howard play a tightly wound married couple who get tempted to stray from each other. Jeff Goldblum plays a sleazy club owner who tries to score with every hot chick who walks through the door. Real-life recording artist Donna Summer plays a would-be singing star (wink, wink), and so on.
          Aside from the anthropological interest of listening to cheesy pickup lines and looking at terrible clothes, the only appeal is seeing interesting people in an uninteresting context. Nunn, who later became the lead singer of the New Wave band Berlin, was a runner-up for the Princess Leia role in Star Wars (1977) around the time she made this flick, so it’s fun to watch her chipper performance and wonder how she might have fared in a galaxy far, far away. Goldblum and Debra Winger (who plays a nice girl adrift in a sea of horny men) shot Thank God It’s Friday just before they became famous, and Summer briefly performs her hit “Last Dance,” which was written for this movie and won an Oscar. So as a time capsule of the disco era, Thank God It’s Friday has merit, but in every other regard, it’s an 89-minute slog until viewers can sing “Thank God It’s Over.”

Thank God It’s Friday: LAME