The bigger they are, the harder they fall. At least, that’s what they say. And, Rudy Ray Moore was never very big, so it’s difficult to visualize the fall he took with Disco Godfather.
Disco Godfather wasn’t just disappointing it singlehandedly sunk More’s career. In fact, it was a movie so bad, it seemed expertly designed to dismantle everything Moore had worked to build. It is this strange product of monumental misjudgment that is nearly impossible to comprehend.
Disco Godfather is an example of how watching a man like Moore make a ‘masterpiece’ is a sad reality. Like every artist in the world, Moore also went on to create fraud and governed a retired life, but watching him toil to make this ‘masterpiece’ comes off as one quite fetching. If this is excessive dramtic, so be it but I don’t see any other expression to describe Disco Godfather and ‘overly dramatic’ is the softest term anyone could possibly award this movie.
With Dolemite, Moore left his stamp on the action film. With Petey Wheatstraw The Devil’s Son-in-Law, he shifted his focus to horror. Now, with Disco Godfather, he aims to broaden his horizons and attempt to stamp drama.
Up till now, Moore had the Midas touch, turning several bad concepts into success stories, so it is hard to blame him for thinking he could pull the same trick on Disco Godfather. The difference is that Moore’s sense of humor, his natural charm, and his over-the-top performances go wonderfully with action or horror, which people often enjoy. People don’t go to drama if they want to have a good time, and that makes him a painfully inaccurate fit for the film. It doesn’t do him any favors that Disco Godfather was pretty much Moore’s modern-day version of Reefer Madness. To give credit where it is due, Moore and everybody else involved with this film does have a point. PCP/angle dust/wack (the film uses all three terms) is horrible. I think we all can agree on that one. While the panic surrounding marijuana was mostly overdone and poorly executed, I doubt many of us reading this would be comfortable knowing a friend or family member was a regular PCP user.
With a film, there’s nothing wrong with depicting drug use as A Bad Thing. Building up to it with the intellect and sophistication of Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue is, in fact, what made it so bad approaching the concept in this manner hurt the narrative.
Embarrassing, even, is that Disco Godfather tries to capitalize off of a scene that, by 1979, was already getting stale. This is not something people will identify as easily nowadays (if something is set in the 1970s, disco is completely reasonable and almost obligatory to include), but when a reporter goes to interview The Disco Godfather about the disco dance craze, you know, why it’s happening well after the popularity of disco, it must have been painfully out of touch for audiences to witness.
Moore, as expected, embodies The Disco Godfather. If there is a single music genre that Rudy Ray Moore has the least association with, it has to be Bavarian zither folk. But Disco would definitely be a close contender to that.
The claim that he has any interest in disco is laughable, especially when considering that it was only five years ago that he seemed to buck every trend possible for Dolemite. Moore was always a visionary, but the Disco Godfather forced him into a mold that he simply could not fit into.
And though he tried God bless him, he did try no kind of love or passion for the material show through. The music drowns him out regardless of whether he is doing his signature, standout, syncopated, rhyming monologues. Whether that is bad audio mixing or a peculiarly subdued delivery by Moore, we can read into that far too much.
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