PUT YOUR WEIGHT ON IT!! Rudy Ray Moore rocked the blaxploitation world in 1974 with the admittedly-flawed classic Dolemite. Dolemite, for those unaware, is about the titular criminal Dolemite, played by Moore, going after the bunch of no-business born-insecure rat-soup-eating motherfuckers who sent him to prison, led by Willie Green, the Baddest Motherfucker the World Has Ever Seen. While definitely not the first '70s blaxploitation movie, Dolemite is certainly the most recognizable, containing and creating many of the over-the-top camp tropes that would definitely the subgenre. Comedian Moore would go on to make Dolemite his stage persona and play permutations of the character over the course of several other blaxploitation films, including Dolemite's sequel The Human Tornado. Now I have seen both Dolemite films, and points to those who can guess what the third Moore flick I've watched is. And points to those who can deduce which of them is my favorite. Ding-ding-ding!
Disco Godfather tells the tale of Tucker Williams, aka the Disco Godfather, a former cop who now runs the local disco joint--for indeed, Moore's character is a true good guy in this one, being more a Godfather to the community, and not in any sort of ironic sense. The opening few minutes are an excuse for Rudy Ray Moore to show up in his extremely '70s sequined vest, and make goofy faces at the camera while wiggling his hips like a disco Elvis. It's pretty incredible. Anyway, Williams' nephew Bucky is getting himself caught up with some gangsters in the employ of Stinger Ray, the local PCP salesman. Bucky has a prosperous academic and athletic career ahead of him, but he's also quite fond of the dissociative high of phencyclidine. Inevitably his trip goes sour and he begins hallucinating the patrons of the disco club as zombies, hags, and skeletons, in one of the most amazing cinematic sequences ever. Seeing the effects of PCP in a personal way haunts Williams, and naturally, being a Rudy Ray Moore character and thus a hard-up motherfucker, he's going to take on this so-called "wack" with the skills he's picked up as a cop and a community organizer. Much of the movie features the Godfather putting together his "Attack the Wack" campaign, and before long you'll have heard character say "Attack the Wack" even more than you'll hear Moore's screech "Put your weight on it! Put your weight on it!" at his disco guests. All of this is intermixed with increasingly hallucinatory disco sequences, all leading to the best ending I've seen in a film this year.
Where to begin? Disco Godfather is a movie which enters the outrageous realm of self-parody while also sidestepping some of the vices that made Dolemite not so fun a ride for me. Dolemite is a movie that's famous because of its anarchy. It plays by no rules, including the rules of cinematic narrative. That's why when I first watched it I panicked when I realized the movie was done and I hadn't paid attention in over thirty minutes. Disco Godfather tries to be funny often enough to call it a comedy, and in that sense becomes chaotic, but what contains the movie as a whole is the fact that it never becomes any more outrageous than disco actually was. It is, if the lengthy dance sequences are any indication, some kind of disco porn. You're meant to bring a date to it, snort some coke over the end credits, and then go down to the club. Or something to that effect. I don't know what Rudy Ray Moore would want from us, but he'd want us to have fun.
And have fun we do. In a lot of ways, everything about this movie is pure camp. This is one of Moore's campiest roles, perhaps even campier than Dolemite, if nothing else because he's so absurdly gentlemanly. He's something sort of like how I'd imagine the Third Doctor if Doctor Who was an American show...brusque, curt, hard on the things he hates, but doing what he does out of heart and caring. The Attack the Wack campaign is a hilariously cheesy After School Special affair, sounding more like open warfare on masturbation than any sort of battle against drugs. I made a coke joke earlier, but in all seriousness: it is weird to think about an anti-drug campaign forming in a disco, of all places. Dance clubs attract young people which means there are bound to be many social activists in the club scene, so that's somewhat realistic to my mind at least, but a lot of the disco-goers of the '70s from what I know, at least the white ones, would probably have a lot of sympathy for someone who likes going all Night of the Chainsaw before hitting the floor. That's not to say that everyone who dug disco when it was alive slunk off to the bathrooms to shoot up (after all, drug problems were still yet to worsen in the club scenes as far as the 20th Century was concerned), but there's almost no time spent at all on the clientele's reaction to Williams' campaign outside of their appreciation and support. That gives the movie a decidedly optimistic slant, however, and I can totally dig that. Dolemite left us with harrowing images of heroin abuse; Disco Godfather shows us some hilarious exploitation psychedelia, thus generally confining its affair with drugs to the goofy side of whatever spectra govern the shape of drug films. Even the ending has a way out, as hopeless as it seems at first.
PUT YOUR WEIGHT ON IT!!! Disco Godfather is a liberating experience, an experiment in mood, humor, and sound. If you like your movies funky this will probably hit every spot you've got to hit. See it at once.
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