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Can't Stop the Music aspires to nothing more radical than providing a raucous good time, and not so coincidentally promoting the Village People's new album. (The title song consumes the final eleven minutes of screen time.) It is hard to get angry about this harmless, weightless enterprise, an attempt to blend the spirit of the opulent old MGM musicals with the jackhammer sound of disco. The movie brings a certain chaotic zest to the group's Y.M.C.A., transforming it into a lavender update of a Busby Berkeley danceathon; and Paul Sand performs comic wonders with the role of a manic music executive. But there is no style here. Producer Allan Carr's guiding principle seems to be: shoot everything that moves, throw it on the cutting-room floor, give the editor a vacuum cleaner and hope that it will all work out. It doesn't: Can't Stop the Music is overkill, all noise and motion.
"Anything worth doin's worth overdoin'," says Meat Loaf, the 260-lb. rock singer and star of Roadie. But this is one movie that knows how to overdo it—with speed, elegance, wall-to-wall raunch and a flaky, sidewise wit. Meat Loaf plays Travis W. Redfish, a north Texas naif with the soul of Candide and the hands of an expert mechanic. He hooks up as the "roadie" (bus driver and equipment manager) for a sleazy rock entrepreneur and falls immediately in love with Lola Bouilliabase (Kaki Hunter), a snaggletoothed, anorectic groupie whose mission in life is to sleep with Alice Cooper. "Isn't she one of Charlie's Angels?" asks Travis. Says Lola: "I can't believe you never heard of Alice Cooper! Don't you read T shirts?" Guess what? Travis becomes a roadie superstar and deposits Lola with Alice himself. But she follows the course of true love into the front seat of Travis' pickup truck—just as the spaceship from Close Encounters alights with a request for Travis to perform a quick lube job.
Director Alan Rudolph, whose Welcome to L.A. examined the West Coast music scene from a perspective so distant it seemed almost Martian, has fashioned Roadie into a kind of live-action Road Runner cartoon and added the exuberant bad taste of Russ Meyer's redneck sex movies. Roadie has bar brawls, earth quakes, sloppy eaters, hair-rollered harridans, fire-engine-red panties and lots of loud rock 'n' roll. In its second hour, the movie loses some of this mad enchantment: Guest Stars Alice Cooper and Deborah Harry (Blondie) do not jell with Rudolph's genially grotesque surrealism. But Roadie is still the weirdest, funniest movie of the summer, with the genuine energy of good pop music. Half a Loaf is better than none—or, as the star himself would croon it, one-half outta three ain't bad.
—By Richard Corliss