21. STAGEFRIGHTS: Musicals are hell to endure. Can I get a hell yeah!?

In his childhood, Anil (Mithun Chakraborty) watched helplessly as a rich man named P.N. Oberoi (Om Shivpuri) beat his mother in the streets and then had numerous thugs slap him around. All Anil wanted to do was dance and sing. Now, he has to live with this memory.

Yet dance and sing he does, as he’s noticed by David Brown (Om Puri), a manager who wants to replace his current disco star Sam (Karan Razdan) as his ego has grown too big. Now known as Jimmy, our hero becomes a disco star while falling in love with his enemy’s daughter Rita (Kim)

Oberoi is one of the most brutal villains I’ve seen in a movie in a long time. He hooks Jimmy’s guitar up to an electrical current in the hopes of killing him, but it fries his mother instead. Now, Jimmy can’t play the guitar and thanks to Oberoi’s henchmen, he can’t walk either. Rita must nurse him back to health and get him ready for the stage.

The film ends at the International Disco Dancing Competition, where Jimmy gets on stage and can’t sing. Rita gets up and starts screaming at him, trying to force him to sing. Finally, Jimmy’s uncle Raju (Rajesh Khanna) throws him a guitar and tells him that his mother is in his music. He plays like he never has before, winning the contest, just in time for Oberoi’s killers to rush the stage and shoot Raju.

This has stopped being disco.

Jimmy goes for revenge, killing every single guard through dance fighting, before getting justice in the most perfect way possible. Electrocution.

Disco Dancer was a huge hit, not just in its own country, but in Southern and Central Asia, Eastern and Western Africa, Japan, the Middle East, East Asia, Turkey and the Soviet Union. There’s even a Jimmy statue in Osaka! It also inspired the Devo song “Disco Dancer” and “Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja” appears in You Don’t Mess With the Zohan and was covered by M.I.A.

The soundtrack may not always be pure disco, but at times it has some wild sounds, like how “Koi Yahaan Nache Nache” samples “Video Killed the Radio Star,” French disco star Marc Cerrone’s “Cerrone’s Paradise” is used — probably without permission — and “Krishna Dharti Pe Aaja Tu” used parts of “Jesus” by Tielman Brothers, who were the first Dutch-Indonesian band to successfully venture into the international music scene. There’s another French disco song that’s sampled in this, Ottawan’s “T’es Ok T’es Bath.”

This movie has all the colors, all the drama, all the disco dancing. Seriously, it’s incredible even if the music isn’t all that disco at times. If you’re just starting to get into Bollywood films, this is a great place to start, because this truly has some mind destroying scenes.

You can watch this on YouTube.