When pop-culture mavens bemoan the suck-assity of movie sequels, we usually point to a few universally recognized examples of overt greed, poor judgment, and sixty-eight cracked-out chimps locked in a room, the better to bludgeon market savvy to a pulp: the Police Academy franchise. The second installment of Jurassic Park. Most horror-movie cycles. The movie that shoveled the first spadeful of earth into Jackie Gleason’s grave, a.k.a. The Sting II. But nobody ever mentions what may well qualify as the single worst sequel of all time, both in stand-alone crappiness and in the wide gap in quality between its well-regarded sire and itself: Staying Alive.

Staying Alive suffers from all the usual sequel-related maladies. The producers waited far too long to strike the iron again, for one thing. Nearly six years had passed since the release of Saturday Night Fever, and while SNF did a respectable business at the box office, the body couldn’t have gotten much colder; in Staying Alive, Tony Manero walks glumly past the scene of his former bittersweet glory, 2001 Odyssey, and we see that it has become a seedy “all-male revue” (and, according to the knowledgeable Gustave, remains one even today). Saturday Night Fever functioned even in its own time as a seventies-drenched set piece, a magnifying glass trained on a section of the era from whence it came, and hauling it forward into the leg-warmer-festooned, self-serious-sans-substance eighties doesn’t work, at all. The writing is, in a word, embarrassing. The premise is ludicrous, and everything that proceeds from the premise – that Broadway dancers by and large are heterosexual, that the choreographer would bother giving a prima donna like Tony a histrionic speech about his “anger” instead of blacklisting his pouty ass – is even more ludicrous. And, more than anything else, what contributes to the atmosphere of general haplessness is the fact that SNF didn’t really leave room for a sequel in the first place. Film critics – most notoriously, the late Gene Siskel – took the original seriously because it had such dark, decisive overtones of finality. We knew what would become of Tony and his friends – namely, nothing much. That’s why it’s compelling today, for more than the risible fashions on display; it’s a razor-thin slice of a life largely devoid of hope.

Staying Alive isn’t compelling, unless we’re using the word “compelling” as a euphemism for the effects of a powerful purgative. Seriously – it’s nearly unwatchable, it’s so badly conceived. Robert Stigwood, who should have faced a firing squad for the crime he committed against culture with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a.k.a. “Frampton’s Alamo,” rose from the ashes somehow, pitched Staying Alive to a team of studio heads clearly preoccupied with sucking Quaaludes out of the bellybuttons of strippers, and blithely handed over the writing credit to Sylvester Stallone. Sylvester fucking Stallone, people. And don’t give me this “he won an Oscar for Rocky” business, either – that won seven years before Staying Alive went into production, and in a famously weak year at the movies. The man also wrote Rhinestone. I don’t think Norman Wexler, who penned SNF, had anything better to do – why didn’t they get him involved? He wrote Serpico, for god’s sake. Oh, I see – Wexler must have had a tiny shred of dignity left. Anyway, Stigwood then dispatched a six-thousand-pound sarcophagus filled with hundred-dollar bills to the Bee Gees to reprise their scene-setting role in SNF, and they took a break from having under-age Vietnamese “masseuses” blow coke up their butts with a straw to compose a handful of limper-than-day-old-overboiled-linguine smooth-jazz numbers better suited to an elevator in Edgar Allan Poe’s vision of hell than to a wide-release motion picture, even in 1983, and then Stigwood leased seventeen 220-volt hair dryers from the Soviets and set about making one of the worst five movies ever.

And there’s really only one way to get through a film as awful as Staying Alive without rupturing something, and that’s with alcohol. Better yet, with a drinking game, because believe me when I tell you that you won’t need to concentrate on the “plot.” One caution: pace yourself. Everything I’ve listed here happens at least a half a dozen times during the movie, so stick to small sips.

A member of the main cast busts out a dance move you could do at home, even though you live in a studio apartment, haven’t worked out in eight months, smoke a pack a day, and have no legs: 1 drink

The dance move you could do at home, even though you have no legs and whatnot, earns high praise or adoring looks from another cast member: 1 drink, plus a chorus of “my grandmother could pull that leap off — and she’s dead”

The camera has so much Vaseline on it that you can’t make out anyone’s face: 1 drink

You aren’t actively relieved about that: 2 more drinks, and a hungover visit to Lenscrafters

The camera lingers a little too long on a dancer’s sweaty, bunched-up-way-too-thin-tights-containing butt-crack: 1 drink

It’s Travolta’s butt-crack: 2 drinks

You can see Travolta’s butt pores: finish your drink and I can hear you laughing, but trust me, you’ll drink for this a bunch of times

Stallone spotting: 1 drink

Fur-wearing Sly Stallone spotting: 2 drinks

Travolta’s package visibly changes size or shape from one shot to the next: 1 drink

Of everyone in the room, you notice first: busted! 2 drinks

You know the scene in National Lampoon’s European Vacation where the Griswolds’ luggage gets stolen, so they go shopping and get kitted out in the “latest” Italian fashions which even at the time the movie came out looked hideous, and Rusty had on that scary white-and-brown striped leather suit with the little fins on the shoulders? Every time the choreographer has on an outfit like that: 1 drink

He’s still the best-dressed guy in the shot: 2 drinks

Yes, “even with the jodhpurs”: bottoms up, suckers

John Travolta’s lipstick matches Cynthia Rhodes’s lipstick, and they haven’t kissed: 1 drink

Cynthia Rhodes shows up the lead dancer in the show: 1 drink

And everyone else on the floor: 2 drinks

And a blinking sign appears above her head reading, “CYNTHIA, FOR CHRIST’S SWEET SAKE CALL YOUR AGENT”: drop a shot into that beer

A “funny” line thuds: 1 drink hey, remember what I said about sipping?

It comes up again later: 2 drinks SIPPING, people seriously

And again: one long, pain-numbing gulp

And again: finish your drink and crawl over the bodies of your alcohol-poisoned friends to get to the bathroom crawl fast no, faster than that

You wonder aloud whether a licensed GYN choreographed a dance sequence: 1 drink

Of everyone in the room, you wonder it first: 2 drinks

When someone else wonders it first, you chime in with “I think I saw an ovary”: 2 drinks

“Huh?”: finish it, moron

You can actually hear the operator asking the Bee Gees to deposit another fifty cents: 1 drink

You feel a twinge of sympathy for one of the extras: 1 drink

You feel a twinge of sympathy for ALL of the extras: 1 drink

“They made a guy wear that outfit?”: 2 drinks

“They made a girl wear that outfit?”: you’ll know it when you see it 3 drinks

First prediction of legal action brought against the costume designer of Legend for stealing Travolta’s outfit in the big finale: Social!

Finola Hughes is mysteriously replaced by Michael Michele after about a hundred hits of helium: 1 drink

Finola Hughes is mysteriously replaced by the bottomed-out Behind The Music version of the Gibson girl: 1 drink

Finola Hughes comes back: open your throat and let the healing begin

John Travolta asks Finola Hughes out: 1 drink

John Travolta asks Cynthia Rhodes to get back together with him: 1 drink

John Travolta asks Finola Hughes out again: 2 drinks

John Travolta asks Cynthia Rhodes to get back together with him AGAIN: 2 drinks

Cynthia Rhodes spray-paints “welcome” on her back, lies down, and lets John Travolta wipe his muddy shoes on her ass, i.e. “agrees to give their relationship yet another chance, despite the fact that he’s spent the entire movie clad in pants so tight as to induce erectile dysfunction”: 3 drinks

Cynthia Rhodes does all of the above WHILE John Travolta is ogling Finola Hughes’s bony sternum: Social!

A male character’s hair looks like a Koosh ball: 1 drink

or Richard Marx: 2 drinks

or Richard Marx after getting hit by a car, then pelted with Koosh balls: 2 drinks

A headband is worn for the sake of the headband, and not to actually propel any hair away from the head in a band-like fashion: 1 drink

It’s a braided headband: 2 drinks sipping? Ring a bell? Okay, just checking

It’s a braided METALLIC headband: 3 drinks

John Travolta forgets he’s supposed to have a Brooklyn accent: 1 drink

John Travolta remembers mid-sentence that he’s supposed to have a Brooklyn accent: 2 drinks. Okay, I mean it with the sipping. Really. Because this happens, like, seven hundred and twelve times in the first scene, so take it easy

John Travolta’s weird, stiff-armed walk reminds you of Molly Shannon’s non-arm-moving-when-she-walks character from Seinfeld: 1 drink SIPPING! SIP! PING! Can’t stress that enough here!

One of the characters makes a references to New York City that equates Brooklyn with Amish country: 1 drink

The camera pans across a New York City scene so apocalyptic that it looks faked: 1 drink

The camera pans across a New York City skyline that definitely is faked: 2 drinks

A character’s winsome smile is accompanied by the audible ka-chinging of his or her dentist’s cash register at $450 a cap: finish off the bottle and call 911

That should keep you occupied over the holidays. Apologize to your livers for me.

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