That
the staid, torch-bearing woman who serves as the erstwhile Columbia
TriStar’s logo — you know, the one that looks like a cross between
Annie Potts and Annette Bening — busts out some disc moves at the
beginning of Thank God It’s Friday should tell you everything
you need to know about this slice-of-nightlife musical dramedy from
1978. Featuring early performances by Jeff Goldblum and Debra Winger,
and written by Armyan Bernstein — who would go on to produce a wide
range of chiefly guys’ flicks, including The Hurricane, Air Force One, End of Days, Spy Game and For Love of the Game — the movie is a weird sort of time capsule; think of it as informal prequel to 200 Cigarettes, made very obviously for the boogie-down crowd to capitalize on a waning trend.

Set over the course of a single evening at the hottest nightspot in town, all leading up to a scheduled set by the Commodores, Thank God It’s Friday
tells a clutch of intersecting stories, including that of a mismatched
couple on a blind date; a disco diva trying to get the deejay to play
her demo; another uptight couple, Dave (Mark Lonow) and Susan (Andrea
Howard), celebrating their anniversary; two underage disco queens
(Terri Nunn and Valerie Landsburg) out to crash Club Zoo and strut
their stuff; and a sleazy, glad-handing owner, Tony Demarco (Goldblum),
who’ll do anything to bag a lady. The big news, per the DVD cover, is
Donna Summer — who sings the Oscar-winning “Last Dance,” and sets the
dance floor a-burnin’ as Nicole Sims — but she and the Commodores are
in all honesty late entries to this party, and blow in and out like a
cool but inconsequential breeze.

Full of polyester threads, banana daiquiris and laughably bad helmet-hairdos, Thank God It’s Friday
is a yawning trifle through and through. The music is decent, but the
film’s intense stroboscopic dance scenes are enough to induce seizure
on the small screen, even without the presence of Mary Hart. The acting
is, for the most part, declamatory and amateurish (on occasion you even
see a couple actors look down to hit their marks), but it’s amusing to
see Goldblum’s Cheshire cat grin in its nascent stages, and Winger
shows flashes of why she would go on to establish herself as a breakout
star. Given bad dialogue and rote set-ups, she still manages to put a
fresh spin on things, as in a scene where she spills a drink on a
fellow patron and knocks over items from the bar.

Housed in a single-disc Amray case and presented in anamorphic
widescreen that preserves the aspect ratio of its original exhibition, Thank God It’s Friday
features a 5.1 Dolby digital surround soundtrack in English and a
poorly-mixed track in Portuguese, as well as alternate subtitles in
English, Japanese Spanish and Portuguese — though the latter two are
unbilled on the disc’s packaging sleeve. There are unfortunately no
supplemental bonus features contained herein, vacuuming this title free
of any possible kitsch replay value. D (Movie) D (Disc)