Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

Directed by Bob Chinn (who directed John Holmes in several of the Johnny Wadd movies and Rick Fuente and Lee Stone in the Nick Grande films) and written by Jeffrey Eastman and Darrel Cash, this is not about a person but a place, a club called the Disco Lady. It’s New Year’s Eve and Scorpio Sound (Ken Scudder) is playing the records while everyone gets together to dance. Little of it sounds like the disco of 1978 and instead sounds very AM radio of 1978.

We have an hour to get into what happens.

It’s all rather unconnected, as a hitchhiker named Carla (Rhonda Jo Petty in her first film; she looks a lot like Farrah Fawcett and as you can imagine, this was very important in 1978) meets a drug dealer named the Candyman (Alan Colberg) and gets pimped out. Then, there’s a couple — Rick (Ric Lutze) and Rick’s wife (Robin Savage) and yes, the movie gives her no name, so that should tell you how much it is concerned with relationships — celebrating an anniversary before he dirty talks her in a way that seems like he’s a bit too into it. And ah, there’s Sherry (Ming Jade) and Angie (Angel Ducharme) arriving just as Johnny (Rob Rose) and Tony (Mike Ranger) walk in.

New year’s is a time for people to remember why they love one another, plan for the next trip around the sun and kiss at midnight. But here, in a movie shot in the back of a bowling alley that doubled on the weekend as a club, this take on Saturday Night Fever — well, outside of the fact that all disco to some people was that movie — has couples falling to pieces. Rick gets to the club and in seconds is making out with a waitress (Tiffany Ladd) and comically — and perhaps unintentionally — getting his medallion all over her body. What do you expect when you’re having sex in a squalid back room, on a pallet covered by a sleeping bag in a room full of Coca-Cola?

Rick didn’t even want to be here! Just listen to — or read — this dialogue.

Rick’s Wife: Will you take me dancing tonight?

Rick: What? Not tonight, homey! The Sugar Bowl’s on TV tonight!

Rick’s Wife: Come on honey, it’s New Year’s Eve and we haven’t been out in a long time…

Rick: Oh I know that, but honey I gotta see Alabama.

Rick’s Wife: Come on Rick, it’ll be fun.

Rick: Oh I don’t want to honey. It’s Bear Bryant’s last season and everything else. Aww, then tomorrow the games…

The end of this movie broke my brain, however. Another angry husband, upset that his wife is intending to cheat just like he did, is coming to the club and he’s angry. We see all of the many couples and people we’ve met throughout, including a guy who everyone calls Peter Frampton who triumphantly gets into the Disco Lady. And then, that husband bursts in and the screen slows to slow motion and then even slower, grinding, as we hear him fire his gun. People scream, the folks we’d just witnessed copulating are either killed or maimed or scarred for life by a night that was just supposed to be spent gyrating under the reflective ball or, at best, doing blow in the bathroom and having furtive sex in a storage closet. And now, they’re gone. The screaming keeps overloading the soundtrack, the grainy freeze frame starting to bend and twist and turn and the yelling and terror is still here, as the slow motion keeps ticking by, slower than it ever has before. There’s blood on the dance floor, even if the budget didn’t allow for it.

This absolute void of an ending redeems everything we’ve seen before except for the too short appearance of Rene Bond dancing the night away in potentially her last filmed appearance. She doesn’t have sex, she doesn’t get naked, she’s hotter than everything around her, the law of the invisible proving itself as it always does.

As Marlena Shaw sang, “Well, I can say goodbye in the cold morning light. But I can’t watch love die in the warmth of the night.” Man, I love when adult films fully forget that they’re created to get people aroused and instead seek to utterly destroy them.