The songs are dreadful, the characters atrocious (personal fave: mandatory brunette single friend who looks like Dr. Frank N. Furter) and the big numbers are like pouring battery acid in your eyes. Two numbers: the universe's longest, most bizarre musical milk commercial and the construction worker's "straight" dance number are indictable war crimes. This twisted mess, directed by Nancy Walker (aka Rosie the Paper Towel Lady), was meant to bank on the immense popularity of disco. Sadly, disco was being read its last rites, and "Can’t Stop"'s boundless enthusiasm for it, presented as if disco were a revolutionary political statement, is so funny it's almost sad. Gather up your friends, steel your stomach, and prepare to beg them to PLEASE stop the music.

o o o

"Sgt. Pepper" revolves, vaguely, around the magical instruments the original Sgt. Pepper used to stop WWI in 1918. Twenty years later, in 1978, (yes, you read that right) Frampton and the Brothers Gibb form the new Sgt. Pepper's band, though they don't appear to use the instruments. (Why no one bothered to use 'em to stop WWII or Korea or Vietnam, we'll never know.) They go off to Hollywood where Donald Pleasance pants "I Want You" at them and makes them big stars.

Meanwhile, the instruments are stolen by another band, played by Aerosmith, who send a variety of henchmen (including Alice Cooper, Steve Martin and some robots who look like the Joan Rivers robot from "SpaceBalls") to steal the instruments because, um, just because. The theft of the instruments somehow makes local real estate depreciate, because the town is then bought up and turned into a den of vice and sin, but with dancing, sort of like if the Jets and Sharks of West Side Story moved to Potterville from It's a Wonderful Life. 

Back in Hollywood, our "heroes" are serenaded by a woman with glitter make-up that gives her Jabba the Hut eyes and many, many, many shiny sateen outfits are worn. As if things couldn't get worse, the band returns to save the town using clowns, mimes and Earth Wind & Fire, whose usual bizarre dress and antics look positively average compared to all the other eye-raping cartoon silliness. Then Peter, Robin, Maurice and Barry, and their fluffy hair, go beat up Aerosmith. That's right - the BeeGees fight Aerosmith and win. I think Aerosmith quit soon afterward.

don't stop now: more this way!

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