What if they declared a cultural revolution and nobody came? That's pretty much the situation with Can't Stop the Music, the movie that was supposed enshrine disco as the musical trend of the eighties and instead wound up being the genre's epitaph, not to mention destroying the careers of close to anyone involved with it. Purportedly a fictionalized version of the formation of the music group Village People -- if by fictionalized you mean completely divorced from reality and by music group you mean guys who can sing and dance while dressed up as Christopher Street stereotypes -- and an opening volley in the ongoing political actualization of the homosexual community, even if no one in the film can gather the nerve to utter the word "g*y," the film founders under the multiple curses of a director, Nancy "Ida Morgenstern" Walker, making her feature film debut despite the fact that she had never done a musical, stars -- including Steve Guttenberg, Valerie Perrine, and Bruce Jenner -- with no particular talent for singing or dancing, and a script -- for which producer Allan Carr took partial credit -- that barely knows the definition of the words "musical" and "comedy" individually, much less put together.
Hellbent on completing the set they started with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and continued with Xanadu, the loyal devotees of the Temple of Bad, Andrea Lipinski, Kevin Lauderdale, and Dan Persons, join in with their special guest, multimediumrare.com's Orenthal V. Hawkins, to delve into arguably the most benighted of the fin de 70s musicals. So put on your dancing shoes, gently insert your earplugs, and remember: you Can't Stop the Music. Because the indifference of 1980s America has already done the job for you.