Disco Delirio

Disco Music Fever I watched this widescreen curio on YouTube without subtitles. My Italian isn't so hot, so all I can tell you about the plot is that it involves the usual wacky assortment of aspiring youth who overcome various obstacles to open a big disco-slash-performance space. The main two are a handsome local with shoulder-length hair and a flamboyantly gay-acting (I'm not sure if his character is actually supposed to be gay or not) black D.J. named…D.J.

There's a fair amount (but not enough) dancing, and this being Italy, it's pretty bad--I mean the dancers are competent but the choreography is completely uninspired, it's just kind of aerobics movement. When the club opens, you get what you usually get from Italians--nobody (among the paying patrons) really dances, they just kinda sway while standing in place and check each other out.

Fortunately there's a stage show, which is some sort of completely inexplicable and ridiculous science fiction production number involving a Ming the Merciless figure, women with winged shoulder pads, and a girl in a cage. Other figures are lowered from the ceiling, including an R2D2-type robot, and then other pointless stuff happens. What does this have to do with anything? Beats me. It's bad in the way that "Satan's Alley" from "Staying Alive" is, which is sort of a recommendation. Even the opening-night club audience seems unimpressed. But then that's another Italian thing--I've seen rock shows in Italy and the audiences just aren't very demonstrative. (Or at least they weren't a few years after this movie, when I lived there.)

The rest of the movie you can safely skip unless you're just a real 70s disco kitsch completist. Probably like most U.S. disco-themed movies (Thank God It's Friday, Can't Stop the Music), I imagine this one was a flop, which would explain why it seems to have been completely forgotten. As a dance movie, it's about as good as "Suspiria" (ostensibly set at a ballet school) or "Murder Rock" (dance school), which is to say…well, I love almost everything about Italy. But dance and dance music are not among its cultural strengths. Italians are not funky. They can work a stripper pole, but they cannot bust a move--certainly not in vintage Italian exploitation movies, where stripper-pole-type dancing is much more relevant to the target audience anyway.

I love that in Eastern Europe this movie was apparently called something like "Travoltafever," in an attempt to ride the coattails of "Saturday Night Fever."

Even though there is no plot whatsoever, my wife absolutely loved it and watched it two times for the comedy. The long dancing scenes! The neverending driving scenes and those five songs you will hear several times throughout the movie, what is not to love! The dialogues in English translation are also unintentionally hilarious sometimes. And boy, you are not ready for the ending..!

This does not feel like a real movie, it is just a montage of dancing, motorcycle riding scenes and interactions between characters that lead absolutely nowhere. It can be enjoyed as a drinking game though, highly recommend!

Saw this on "the Archive" a few nights ago.

Weirdly charming in a "hey I've got a camera, let's make a movie!" kind of way. Just be prepared for interminable scenes of mediocre-at-best dancing by actors who look like they've just gotten off (*ahem*) the set of a '70s porno flick plus long sequences made up of entirely of B-roll footage of long motorcycle rides through the foggy streets of Milan and a party scene at the local boîte that's just a stationary shot of a table full of people talking over each other and gesticulating wildly (none of the dialogue is discernible, probably not even if you speak Italian) and a maître d' who looks like an Italian Marty Feldman as they mime having "fun" for minutes on end (but it feels like hours) tho' at least elsewhere there's the occasional gem of boneheaded dialogue plus a bizarre striptease scene towards the beginning during which a topless dancer who kudos for being the best dancer is this whole dang thing gets dookie brown paint haphazardly streaked across her body as she dances by some random dude with a paintbrush who's I'm assuming is a closet scat aficionado. Fortunately there's little plot to get in the way of the paper-thin storyline (a bit of an insult to paper, honestly) even with the last-minute insertion of a "dramatic situation" that get tidily resolved almost as soon as it appears.

Five stars (out of 10) if viewed as pure camp and the soundtrack ain't bad neither ("Le Freak" anyone?) tho' you just know none of the music was licensed...