Night Club (1989)

Night Club is just awful, an example of the most incompetent filmmaking, from its terrible script to its talentless cast (two of the actors are also partially responsible for the script – oh boy). So a whiny loser named Nick (Nicholas Hoppe) dreams of owning a club. He uses money his stupid wife (Elizabeth Kaitan) inherited in order to attract a bigger investor, who in turn demands his money back before the club even opens. For some reason, Nick and his wife are planning a trip to Europe at the same time, so the club can’t be all that important to him. Nick and his wife argue about sex or something. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. Half the scenes turn out to be dream sequences anyway (or even dreams within dreams – ugh), and the other half are musical montages in which Nick rides his bicycle around an empty warehouse. And the whole time you’re just like, “Who gives a fuck if this asshole opens a club or not?” I mean, it’s not like the world is clamoring for another club. And no one in this film is the least bit interesting or likeable, so we’re not at all invested in whether they attain their meager goals. We have no backstory or character development. What we do have is the worst soundtrack ever. The movie is only eighty minutes, but the script doesn’t have even eight minutes worth of material or ideas. And Nick doesn’t even work toward making the club happen anyway. He mostly sits around, caught in dreams or musical montages. Or he drives around. Or he tries working on a novel. Yeah, he wants to be a writer as well as a club owner, but has no talent for either. Anyway, the investor gives Nick twenty-four hours to come up with the money, and like six days later he says it’s been twenty-four hours. When Nick says he needs a couple more days, the investor says: “Fuck, this reminds me too much of high school. Like a bunch of us agreed not to do our homework, and I’m the only one who actually didn’t.” Apparently this is still bothering him. Such a stupid remark, and I get the feeling one of the film’s writers (yes, it took four people to write this thing – the screenplay is by Deborah Tilton and Michael Keusch, based on an idea by Nicholas Hoppe and Bevin Chu) actually had that experience in high school. So sad. But maybe this scene is a dream sequence too. Approximately seventy minutes into this piece of shit, one character tells another, “You’re making this up as you’re going along.” That might be the most honest line in the entire film, and maybe one writer said it to the others. Moments later, a character asks, “Did something happen?” The answer is No. But the movie acts as if something has, trying to make it a Twilight Zone-type thing. So, what’s good? Nothing, really. But much of it is so bad that you’ll be laughing out loud, puzzling at how this film came to be financed.