I remember seeing this film when I was a kid with my mother and grandmother and finding it excruciating. I have subsequently been dragged off to see the stage musical, and was astonished to find that a really fun and delightful show. It started me thinking that perhaps I had been too hard on the film as a child and I caught it again recently on cable TV. The only surprise was how in the world a film so devoid of life could have ever managed to become a camp classic! A bunch a Greek muses dance out of a collage in the tacky opening sequence. One of them, played by Olivia Newton-John, returns to "inspire" down-on-his-luck artist Michael Beck to realize his dream of opening a roller disco and they naturally fall in love. Incredibly this is the case where the score provided by John Farrar and the Electric Light Orchestra is pretty good, but literally nothing else in the film works. The "production numbers" are so low-key and deadening that they come off like a cross between something from an episode of Saved by the Bell crossed with Little Rock dinner theater. In fact, the concluding number of the title, wherein one would expect a lot of effort to be thrown is particularly dismal. The plot is incredibly boring and there is nothing in the way of conflict for the two lovers to overcome (unless one counts the dodderingly disapproving voice of an offscreen Wilfrid Hyde-White as Zeus). While it is great to see old pro Gene Kelly on screen, one could only wish that it was in a far better vehicle. Newton-John is surprisingly charmless as the wan muse and shares no chemistry with co-star Beck. However, Beck is the worst performer of the bunch. Whose bright idea was it to cast in a musical a leading man who cannot sing or dance, has no chemistry with the leading lady or any discernible comic timing, and looks so thoroughly appalling roller-skating around California in tiny shorts? I am uncertain I would brand this as the worst screen musical, but I may classify it as the most wrong-headed or tedious - the latter of which should have definitely prevented its "rebirth" as a camp fixture.
