Disturbing disco (spoilers included)

Rating: 1/10 (19 February 2007)

This movie came out when I was a child, and Vinnie Boberino (of Welcome back Kotter) was basically a household name. I was too young to see his movie debut, but the producers for some strange reason (curse them!) decided to release a kinder, gentler, super-edited version for under aged Welcome Back Kotter fans.
I was dragged to the movie to see this by a friend who bought into a lot of hype regarding how great the movie was supposed to be. Mind youI was like 9 or ten years old and would have rather seen Star Wars (for the fifth time), Superman, or anything by Disney.
What I expected to see was something humorous, with a lot of dancing and music What I actually did see was shocking, appalling, disturbing, and frightening despite the heavy editing that cut the film down to like one hour and fifteen minutes (or thereabouts). The scene where his buddy jumps off a bridge gave me nightmares for weeks, and despite the heavy editing the rape scene was stillwell, a rape scene.
A few years later, when I was in High School I finally saw the full-length unedited version of the crap-fest to see if my opinion would change if I a) realized there was more of a plot while viewing the full version or b) was a little older, and more mature.
Sure enough, it appeared to me as no less of a smutty crap-fest than it did the first time around. In fact, I grew to hate it more. Despite a film that glorifies being a low-life rapist who thinks he's Al Pacino, and hangs out at discos with drugged out racist scumbags It also features bad acting, really bad directing, poor dialog, underdeveloped characters, and so much unnecessary use of the F-Bomb that it makes Kevin Smith films look like Saturday morning cartoons.
The worse and most appalling part of this film catastrophe was: THE ENDING! Come on. Unrealistic and degrading to women. What was it about the disco era that made producers of film and television shows (like General Hospital) to glorify and glamorize the cruelty of rape, making it look like all the attacker had to do was apologize to his victim andnext thing you know they fall in love and live happily ever after?!?!?! What a crock
If this was as "gritty" and "real" as some of it's "fans" claim it to beStephanie would have called the cops on Tony, and he would have spent his entire meaningless life in jailRealizing he threw away what could have been a promising dance career when he acted out on his frustration and rage. Now THAT would have been realistic.
The only good thing about this film was the dancingeven though it was to really cheesy music.