TONY MANERO DVD REVIEW

i was just a wee lad of 11 when i saw SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER in the theater. it was rated R because of the gratuitous amount of nudity and profanity which did not shock me that much at the time. i was mature for my age and had already seen A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and the EXORCIST without too much psychological scarring(i hope) so this movie seemed rather tame. john travolta's character in the movie had a much bigger effect on my impressionable mind however. travolta is tony manero. he rules the disco club with his smooth dancing skills and impeccable style. his day to day life was rather mundane but he became someone different when the bee gees song comes on and he could strut his stuff on the dancefloor. underneath the disco ball he became a sex symbol, a powerful man that had to be watched and admired by both sexes. like many others back then i watched the movie over and over. i studied and copied his dancing moves. i tried to coif my hair like he did and dressed in the signature black and white suite when i went to the local roller rink every saturday night for disco night. but as hard as i tried i never became him and by 1978 disco was out. punk was in.

  the movie TONY MANERO is also about someone who watched SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER way too many times and desperately wanted to be the disco god . raul is a 52 year old man living in chile and living the dream that he is tony manero. he lives by himself and has no job. he enters a tony manero look a like contest on a tv gameshow in order to give his pathetic life a purpose. by now you might think that TONY MANERO is a comedy. it is not. you see raul is also a serial killer. yep, when he is not working on his sweet disco moves, raul likes to beat people to death. TONY MANERO reminded me a lot of TAXI DRIVER another gritty movie about a man's dark obsession turned to violence. chile was not a happy place to be during the '70s. it was a police state and anyone who dared to question the government was thrown in the back of a car and never seen again. this environment makes it easy for raul to get away with his killing. he kills the couple that run the local theater for daring to replace his beloved SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER with GREASE. as the police get very close to nailing him, raul finally get's his shot to be his idol on live tv. does he win? does he get caught? does he kill again? watch it and find out.(not available on netflix streaming but available on dvd)