DISCO MOVIES:
the last (space age) picture show
By Don Fields
From bottom to top of the heap goes as follows: Staying Alive, Thank God It's Friday, Avenging Disco Godfather, Xanadu, The Apple and numbero uno from hell-o, Can't Stop The Music.
Sure, these usual suspects did their share of putting the earth into disco's grave, but this is far from what the writer was suggesting. The full picture of disco's decline was the traditional eternal loop where the mainstream discovers a sub-culture, nurturing it for the masses, support for the sudden acceptance, saturate the landscape to meet all over reactive expectations, squeezing out the last dollar before the consumer burn out and finally barring it and dance on its grave loudly demanding like a New York cop that this sub-culture is dead and that we should keep move along just so the mainstream doesn't get embarrassed with it and what they done.
As it turned out, disco wasn't dead. It moved to Europe, morphed along with the evolution of dance music and has come back to these shores in little compilation CD's and box sets from Rhino Records.
These movies were nothing more than a result of the disco frenzy that happened just before or after the burn out cusp. However, this doesn't make them innocent either, specially the fact that there hasn't been a successful "disco" movie after Saturday Night Fever and there wasn't a successful musical for years since Grease. That damned Travolta bastard, it was HIS fault all along...but I digress...
Along side those avenging compilations, there's been a slow invasion of these same disco flicks DVD reissues that causes an utopian opportunity for the nostalgia addicts, filler for critics & pop culture writers and bad cocaine flashbacks to those who barely survived it. Just ask the former Village People lead singer for his opinion between coke busts.
My personal association to this list is close yet oddly distant. I have seen all of these flicks, except the 'Disco Godfather', and, outside of Xanadu, I don't have a full memory of them. I've seen them in bits and pieces thanks to various run-ins on late night TV. Hell, I felt too geekish and nervous to even listen to the music in the first place as I used to think this music came from porn films, which explains why I listened to this stuff alone or on headphones.
I only saw Staying Alive once during the hollowed days of the Z Channel and I knew it was going to stink up the cable box when I saw Sly Stalone's writer & director credits. Hell, just star in it ya ox and get it over with! The Bee Gees were in the soundtrack, but it was Sly's brother, Frank, who took the spotlight and dugged the whole project into a level of hell that was never imagined before. Sure, it had no disco as it was made in 1983, but it wasn't necessary. The suspects listed here more than filled that hellish space.
I don't remember much about 'Thank God It's Friday' other than the publicity when it was first released in the theaters and record stores and two years later for its TV debut at 11:35 pm on CBS's Late Night Movie. I knew Jeff Goldblum was in there somewhere, the plot was your typical night at the disco (minus the Studio 54 sized mountains of sex & drugs) and I was looking for Donna Summer as I still had a crush on her.
I haven't seen Disco Godfather, as I'm not much on black-exploitation and Rudy Ray Moore films. Just to show you, though, that even in African American circles, they, too, can be bowled over by the disco mirrored ball.
Xanadu?! Not too surprised. I'm all too close to this particular thanks to years of repetitive viewing and maintaining a mega web site (Xanadu Preservation Society) for any objective stance like making the argument that Xanadu wasn't really a disco flick, even though it was planned as such until Roller Boogie was announced and the producers ditched the "D" word. However, all of those skates, loud flashy clothes, flashy cheap SFX and the general flashiness all blows this argument up into little flashy pieces.
In defense though, the music had a much broader musical mixture of big band, 70's musical version of the 80's rock (provided by The Tubes) and danceable pop music (mainly provided by ELO). Unfortunately, the 'pop music' around the time of the movie was 90% disco, so it was difficult for the movie to distance itself from the mirrored ball.
Olivia Newton-John wasn't much of a "disco artist" in the first place either. She has a good flexible voice, but it can't muster the range and muscle needed to belt 'em out like Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor. The closest she ever got to "disco" was the leading track of her 1979 LP, Totally Hot, 'Please Don't Keep Me Waiting'. In this 5-minute recording, Olivia sings with reasonable passion of a neglected affair until three and a half minutes in where she pushes her luck by getting her wordless vamping funk on. When she sang low during this duration, it sound like she's trying to lick the back of her throat and when she reaches for the high ones, it comes off sounding like Mariah Carry on a oxygen binge.
Okay okay, Andrea 'More More More' True didn't have much of what you call a vocal range for this material either, but, unlike dear sweet Olivia, Ms. True was a porn star. Thus she gets an e-ticket to pass this test.
At this point, I begin to differ with the writer. The Apple, the euro-trash disco mayhem brought to you by the makers of those early Chuck Norris movies, should have topped this turkey list with flying rotten colors!! As noted before, my first run-in with the Apple was an all-too-brief-enough stop of channel surfing where I saw a number dressed in aluminum foil while a song's chorus of "AHHHH-AHHHH-AHHHH-AHHHH's that was ripped off from the R&B hit, 'Stranded In The Jungle', blazing away on, once again, that dumping ground called the CBS Late Night Movie.
I finally saw it in full twenty years later as part of a double bill with Xanadu at the New Beverly Theatre in LA. After going through the paces with this umpteenth viewing of the X movie, I strapped into for this ride to disco hell! All the urban legends I've heard surrounding this monster became true and whatever that turned out NOT be became thoroughly believable!