Can't Stop The Music (1980) Didn't think we'd ever come across a copy of this notorious trainwreck, the movie that inspired the creation of The Razzie Awards...(for worst films of the year).......but leave it to BQ in our never ending quest for the strange, the weird and the ugly.......
Yes, boys and girls, it's the infamous Village People musical, that tried to surf the wave of disco music and fake retro nostalgia generated by the unlikely 1978 success of "Grease" with John Travolta and Olivia Newton John.
And who else could have produced it but the ebullient "Grease" ringmaster himself, Allan Carr. Sadly, Carr was one of those blustery camp-loving impresarios born decades too late. A lover of glitzy show-biz pizazz and old "Let's-put-on-a-show" Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musicals, Carr's over-the-top showmanship began to earn him nothing but derision......and failure.
He hit the zeitgeist with 'Grease', but things went sour for him thereafter, with the release of 'Can't Stop The Music' and his infamous producing of the 1989 Academy Awards which featured Rob Lowe dancing with Snow White (much to the fury of the Disney studio).
To Carr, 'Music' must have looked his dream come true......combining the old-fashion Garland-Rooney MGM musicals with the flavor-of-the-month disco group Village People.....who slyly brought gay energy to catchy disco hits like "YMCA", "In The Navy" and "Macho Man"......for those who didn't get the joke, the guys outfitted themselves in testosterone Halloween costumes.....Indian Chief, Construction Worker, Cop, G.I. , yada yada.....
And in a bold, showy move, he handed the directing reigns to veteran tireless TV and movie comedienne Nancy Walker, who herself began her long career as comic relief in the Garland-Rooney shindigs.
Before I get into the movie, let us say that Walker, the first woman to direct a big budget musical did as slick and professional a job as any director Carr could have chosen.....and to our surprise, she fills the film with the kind of eye-catching optical effects and staging that became of mainstay of MTV music videos........(yes, kiddies, back in the stone age, MTV actually used to play music....)
But the movie itself missed the temper of the times by light years. It arrived as a grotesque antique, celebrating music and a group that audiences never thought of as more than a passing fad and even worse, a pathetic joke.
It surely didn't help that Carr tried his "Grease" ploy by miscasting actors too told for the roles they were playing......and placing them along side aged, lost lost actors exhumed from Hollywood's Golden Age. We didn't mind cutie-pies Travolta and Newton John as overaged high schoolers, but who could watch 'Music' s Steve Guttenberg for more than 40 seconds without wanting to strangle him?
Carr's other miscalculation was thinking disco was the future of music. Oops. By the time the film opened, 'disco sucks' T-shirts and decals appeared everywhere......and with the exception of a few of his bouncy-bouncy Top 40 hits for the Village People, composer Jacques Morali's monotonous songs droned on and on, seemingly with no end. This may be the first musical where I checked my watch constantly during the musical numbers.
The cast was a sorry collection of non-entity no-talents (Guttenberg, Valerie Perrine, the four Village people nobodies and, God help us, Bruce Jenner, who probably craved a sex change right after the movie released.) For curiosity seekers, also joining the gang were those tinseltown Golden Oldies June Havoc and Barbara Rush. Consistently though, they all overact like ADD afflicted middle schoolers.....
Director Walker keeps this wildly disparate bunch in a constant state of hysterical overdrive, in what I guess was a vain attempt to duplicate the youthful high spirits of Mickey and Judy's teen MGM tuners. Two of hours of this becomes sheer torture and and more than once we found ourselves muttering, "Oh please, won't all of you just shut the **** up and put on your ****in' show already..."
The music did stop for "Can't Stop The Music" and whatever remained of Alan Carr's career. Strictly for curators of long forgotten, bizarro cinema. Should you stumble upon it anywhere, we'd recommend fast forwarding to only the "YMCA" number (furious, fun and well edited). But skip the rest......1 star (*).
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