Record City pays tribute to a time when Americans bought recorded music — on vinyl, cassettes and eight-track tapes — from national chains with food-based names like Peaches, Coconuts and the scalp-scratching Licorice Pizza. The store in the lone film from TV director Dennis Steinmetz (he of the notorious The World of Sid & Marty Krofft at the Hollywood Bowl special), however, is simply Record City, fittingly generic.
Despite a then-all-star cast of dozens, Record City has no plot, being nothing more than a snapshot of a single day inside those poster-covered walls. As with the same year’s lamentable Skatetown U.S.A., which shares a cast member in comedy vacuum Ruth Buzzi, it abstains from story to present a loosely strung collection of low-stakes bits. Jumping from character to character with barely an arc in its way, it resembles one of those “A Mad Peek Behind the Scenes of” two-page spreads Mad magazine used to do, in which the totality of the place in question was presented in a single image from a God’s-eye view; no matter where you looked, something was happening.
Here, that includes:
• the greasy store manager (Michael Callan, 1988’s Freeway) sexually harassing employees and forcing himself on customers
• the nice-guy employee (Dennis Bowen, Van Nuys Blvd.) pining for the attention of the good-girl employee (Wendy Schaal, Munchies)
• a cop (Sorrell Booke, Boss Hogg of TV’s The Dukes of Hazzard) standing on a toilet in hopes of catching a serial shoplifter called The Chameleon (Frank Gorshin, Hollywood Vice Squad) while a hick goober named Pokey (Ed Begley Jr., Amazon Women on the Moon) plots a robbery
• F Troop second banana Larry Storch as a deaf customer and Alan Oppenheimer (1973’s Westworld) as a blind customer
• L.A. DJ Rick Dees wearing a gorilla arm while hosting a parking-lot talent contest featuring the likes of Gallagher, the Chicken Lady, Razzie Pee Willie and other Gong Show-level acts
• singer-songwriter Kinky Friedman playing himself and copping a feel
• Ted Lange, aka Your Bartender of TV’s The Love Boat, doing a robot dance
• Harold Sakata, aka Goldfinger’s Oddjob, basically playing Oddjob again, but as a homosexual
I don’t even have room to mention the skateboarders, the hookers, the Nazi engineer or Tim Thomerson’s testicular trauma. There’s a lot going on, and yet nothing going on. It’s the kind of movie whose screenplay (by Ron Friedman, Murder Can Hurt You!) ends by asking the ensemble cast to run in single file and yell, which, mood depending, is not necessarily a negative. —Rod Lott