Disco (2018) - Movie Review

Most people get their friends together to watch movies. Brad Jones is the guy who gets his friends together to make them, and to his credit, it usually results in product that is watchable outside of his inner circle. With as equal a love for the glory days of exploitation cinema as he does all things 70’s, his homebrew style of filmmaking may not be the most technically polished stuff around but the real-life comradery between him and those around him can be reasonably relied on for something fun. And his latest, Disco, is no exception.

With how low-budget this whole affair is, between the main locale of a single disco nightclub with a few spare shots of an alleyway and the Channel Awesome prop warehouse, part of me wishes I could just ignore the production values here. But alas, it’s not that easy. While Brad himself is definitely getting better as a director, allowing for a bit more variety in the shots of people talking rather than his usual back-and-forth, the quality of the footage itself is wildly inconsistent. Some of it is incredibly grainy, while some of it is quite crisp, and the sound mixing by Nick Michalek can be very rough in places.

Of course, limp production values can be forgiven if the lack of budget is put to something worthwhile, like good dialogue and decent acting, and that is definitely on tap here. The central three of Sarah Gobble, Bianca Queen and Laura Luke, both as actors and as individual characters, give the centre of the story’s dancefloor a definite drawing power. Add to that the other regulars, like Brad himself in another amoral performance, Lewis Lovhaug as the epitome of all things tired and safe (i.e. boring), and Fard Muhammad as the reluctant Disco Godfather, and they allow Brad’s dialogue to make its point, whether it’s just people bickering or reminiscing on the disco era or failing to pass the bar without taking at least one shot of liquor with them.

The film opens with "The Present… if the 70’s never ended". Not just set in the 70’s, but in the present day where the decade didn’t end. It’s an odd choice, but one that honestly makes sense when looking at the decade in retrospect. The 70’s, for all intents and purposes, was the last time that the United States had a properly optimistic period. It didn’t have the soul-crushing conformity of the 80’s, the grungy nihilism of the 90’s, the fear-driven turmoil of the 2000’s or even the mass confusion of today. It was an era defined by dance, by copious amounts of cocaine and by some of the greatest music ever made by human hands.

And that, ultimately, is what this film amounts to: A celebration of a time when, no matter what worries were in the heads of the people, they could burn it all off on the dancefloor and have time to really enjoy life. It’s the same dichotomy of dancefloor escapism vs. harsh reality that made disco cinema classics like Saturday Night Fever so damn memorable, and this manages to aim for the same ballpark and actually hit the mark. It’s a carefree, breezy, mildly sleazy but mainly fun feature, soundtracked by everything from the Bee Gees to ABBA to Shine Your Love.