Review #38: 'Disco Godfather' (1979)

It's rare that a film can be simultaneously the greatest and worst film ever made. Herschell Gordon Lewis regularly almost achieves this, notably with his disease-inducing classic The Gore Gore Girls (1972), a film that is so balls-out awful, offending every possible sense in every conceivable way, yet making you laugh so hard that the negatives threaten to almost become redundant. The Grindhouse and blaxploitation genres are 99% awful films. You watch the trailer and wonder how it can fail to be anything but a masterpiece. But then you watch the film and wonder how the director can stretch it out to a 90-minute movie, and also how you can possibly stay awake amongst all the visual crud on display. Yet Disco Godfather is somehow different. Yes, it's fucking awful. It really is. But it's also very, very special.

Tucker Williams is a retired cop who now spends his days wearing crappy, Salvation Army-esque sparkly spandex suits and has re-invented himself as the Disco Godfather. When he's not DJ-ing and demanding that the crowd 'put their weight on it!', he also indulges in a bit of dancing - that is moving his hips in uncomfortable looking motions while brandishing his disturbingly wide and sparkly white grin. But when a new drug hits the street, the Godfather must put aside his disco days and use his street experience to tackle to scum that is putting the 'whack' on the streets, killing the youth and sending one of his family members crazy.

The first half an hour genuinely tested my patience with endless shots of people dancing in a disco while the Disco Godfather shouts an endless of array of quotable lines over the microphone. And the same disco song playing over and over and over again. And then a bit more. But then the 'plot' kicks in and it becomes a riot. From the moment Disco Godfather is paid a visit and is told about his nephew Bucky, lying in a hospital bed, going out of his mind from 'whack' intake, and he stares her in the face and says 'where is Bucky, and what has he ha-yad?', I knew this was an instant classic. Rudy Ray Moore, who plays the eponymous Godfather, was primarily a stand-up comedian in the same vein of Richard Pryor. Thank God the man was good at comedy (I hear) because he would have been laughed out of the audition room if he hadn't. The man is awful at acting. And thank God for it.

The film has so many classic moments it's impossible to comment on them all. An early scene has an ambulance driver, on the scene to rescue another victim of the whack, refer to Tucker as 'Disco Godfather', regardless of the fact that they have never met and the man looks like he wouldn't be seen dead in a disco. Another great scene has the Godfather kung-fu kicking the ass of a gang of henchmen, only to call on a passer-by for help, who coincidentally also possesses the ability to kung-fu kick the ass of henchmen, and proceeds to do so. A film of many delights, and I urge anyone who breathes to track this down and watch it. I feel aggrieved that I have to give this film one star. But I have to, it's phenomenally awful, and the laughs are unintentional. But they are there, and I loved it. You'll be shouting 'put yo' weight on it!' for days.


Directed by: J. Robert Wagoner
Starring: Rudy Ray Moore, Carol Speed, Jimmy Lynch
Country: USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie