“I pay you to look like a monkey AND run the elevator. Not one or the other.”

Drake’s rating: Are we sure this wasn’t a failed TV pilot?

Drake’s review: I made mention of the Donna Summer disco hit “Last Dance” in a recent review, and then got to remembering where I’d first heard the song. Unsurprisingly, it was from a film. Specifically this film, Thank God It’s Friday, which I caught back in the summer of ‘78 when my sister was bored one night and decided we should go see a movie.*

Now the term “Thank God it’s Friday” (also known as “Thank goodness it’s Friday,” or simply TGIF) had been around for decades by the mid-1970s, but it took that decade’s ingenuity to turn a simple phrase into a full-length film centered around disco music. It also took the prompting of Neil Bogart, the head of Casablanca Records, a company which was well-known at the time for two things: KISS and disco. And while KISS would be getting their own turn in front of the cameras (albeit on the small screen) later in the year with the ill-fated KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, Thank God It’s Friday would be focused on Casablanca’s own disco queen sensation, Donna Summer.

Kind of. I mean, sure, Donna Summer gets top billing, but her screen time is wisely limited and doled out in small dabs over the course of the movie because, for all of her considerable talent as a singer, she was kind of a wooden actress. But in a movie spread around several tangled storylines playing out over the course of a single Friday night at a discotheque known as The Zoo, Summer’s acting ability is less important than her impressive voice, which is saved for “Last Dance” late in the film.

And by that time, we’re already knee deep in the lives of the other characters, whether we want to be or not. Tony DiMarco (Jeff Goldblum, Earth Girls Are Easy**), The Zoo’s owner, is a slick womanizer who takes a bet from Bobby Speed, the club’s DJ, that he can leave that night with Sue, a married woman who’s celebrating her fifth wedding anniversary with Dave. Dave, meanwhile, is none too happy to be at the disco, and would rather be home watching TV.

1970s TV. Let that sink in for a minute.

And then there are Jeannie and Frannie, a pair of high school girls who are intent on sneaking into the club so that they can enter the dance contest (OF COURSE there’s a dance contest) and win enough money to buy tickets to the KISS concert. Because cross-promotion was thing, even back then. They’re aided and abetted by Marv Gomez (Chick Vennera, High Risk), a regular at The Zoo who loves two things: leather and dancing. And dancing while wearing nothing but leather, which sounds uncomfortably hot and sticky to me. Marv also helps out Ken, who’s there with his friend Carl looking for girls, because Marv is just generally helpful and it also gives him the chance to dance in the parking lot.

And there’s Gus, who is at the club looking for his blind date, and the disturbing dental hygienist who happily gets high on her own supply before donning a shocking pink wig and heading off to The Zoo, and Debra Winger shows up as do the Commodores, and if this is all sounding like a two-hour episode of the Love Boat, you’re not entirely wrong. Thank God It’s Friday is very much a television movie with a few recognizable faces, scads of extras and a musical guest-star or two, and a large enough budget to get it all onto the big screen.

Still, Thank God It’s Friday might be light fluff, but it’s fairly inoffensive light fluff that makes for a casual watch. It’s also a nice little time capsule of the disco scene in 1978. I’m assuming. Look, disco really wasn’t my thing, so I’m just going to take this movie’s word that it wasn’t all white suits and black shirts by ‘78. And, aside from Saturday Night Fever, this is probably one of the better disco-centric flicks around.

And I say “probably” because I’m really not going to dive into that rather limited genre in search of more movies to review. I don’t care what my Mutant Contract says.***

*This is also how I saw Big Wednesday and Saturday Night Fever, among other films. My sister was pretty dang cool.

**You’re going to want to read Heather’s review of that film for the most memorable description of Goldblum I’ve ever read. You’ll never look at a lemur the same way again.

***I don’t think it mentions disco specifically, but the glowing green ink makes my eyes water if I look at it too long, so it really just sits unread in its protective lead case.

Intermission!

• Sure, the opening song is repetitive, but you like it, right? You’d better, because it’s gonna be played throughout the entire movie.
• Man, those 1970s wedge shoes. I hope no one falls off of them, because that could be fatal.
• Dave got Sue a pepper mill for a fifth anniversary present. Dave is evidently not planning on a sixth anniversary.
• Hitchhiking in L.A. because it’s 1978.
• WARNING: Flashing lights in the disco.
• An auto-locking security door for the stairwell? That’s all kinds of illegal.
• A constant joke throughout the movie is the abuse the poor Porsche takes. It gets dinged by pretty much every car that comes into the parking lot, before finally succumbing to a pepper mill assault.
• Donna Summer isn’t the only musician in the movie. High school girl Jeannie is played by Terri Nunn, later of the techno-pop band Berlin, while near-sighted Carl is portrayed by Paul Jabara, who wrote “Last Dance” as well as co-writing “It’s Raining Men” for the Weathergirls with Paul Shaffer.
• Shaffer himself wasn’t in this movie, but he was a keyboardist in an early lineup for the pop band Scandal. None of that is germane to this flick, I just enjoy music trivia.
• For movie-related trivia that is germane to this movie, Thank God It’s Friday was directed by Robert Klane, who later wrote Weekend at Bernie’s. He then made the mistake of not only writing but directing the sequel as well. Rumors that he went into witness protection five minutes in the premiere of Weekend at Bernie’s II are unfounded, but likely.