American Fever

Screened on Severin Films blu-ray

If "vansploitation" can be a genre, so can "discoploitation." Born from the popularity of the US mega-hit Saturday Night Fever, leave it to the exploitation masters in Italy to create a series of films capitalizing on the rising sales of disco music that was seeping its way into the culture at a meteoric pace. Like any trend that comes to prominence that quickly, disco was likely to fall out of favor in equally quick fashion, so the time to cash-in was going to be quick.

Decades later, Severin Films would release a blu-ray box set of three films from that era's cash-in, of which American Fever is one. Having already experienced Grease Rock, I wasn't expecting much here, which proved to be right. But unlike that film, this one was actually fun to watch. Not that Grease Rock was a miserable experience, but nothing about it clicked for me, none of it really feeling all that "disco" to me. Here, however, it's plentiful. Perhaps too plentiful in the form of the film's theme song, which will now be stuck in my head for days most likely, but it fits the film well and doubles down on the "let's rip off that John Travolta flick, but for Italian audiences" approach. To really give you a good idea of how bold the Italians could be in their film industry of the time, the last film in the box set features a near-doppelgänger of Travolta in the lead, and the title is John Travolto: The Face With 2 Left Feet. Amazing, right?

Recommended for when cheesy, campy fun sounds like it would really hit the spot.