ROLLER BOOGIE is from the long Hollywood tradition of trying to cash in on youth trends. This little confection tried to capture the roller skating culture of Venice Beach. It casts a 20-year-old Linda Blair in the lead and a roller skating champion with no acting experience as her love interest. They're just kids having fun, but it's the stuffy adults that always have to come and ruin their vibe.
Blair (THE EXORCIST) plays Terry Barkley, a rich girl from Bel-Air whose parents want her to be a concert flutist. She wants to be a roller skating champion. As an adult myself, it's hard to 100% root for her life decisions there. Bobby James (Jim Bray) is an amateur roller skating champ, who works at a skate rental stand on the boardwalk. They met up at the local roller rink where his friends bet him that he can't get her to skate with him, because there is no way a girl driving a million dollar car would ever skate with a beach bum. As you can guess, she not only skates with him, but also asks him to teach her to skate like him.
This rich girl-poor guy material is all typical melodramatic hogwash so that the actors have something to do opposite skate numbers. Unlike good trend films like SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER or even URBAN COWBOY, this film doesn't have compelling characters to hold our attention through the skating sequences. Oh if only John Travolta were a skater. Blair plays Terry as a little snooty because that comes with the zip code of course. Frustratingly, she doesn't seem to ever know what she really wants from life or from boys. Bray is not an actor, but he can skate. So the film is much better when he's doing what he knows.
Like it ran out of material and needed to pump up the drama at the end, the film tacks on conflict between rink owner Jammer Delany (Sean McClory, THE QUIET MAN) and gangster land developer Thatcher (Mark Goddard, TV's ONE LIFE TO LIVE), who threatens violence if he doesn't sell. The logic of the entire development can't stand up even on bare feet. And it all gets wrapped up in one scene where all the characters, even Terry's parents, end up together listening to a tape of the bad guy incriminating himself.
The film is like skating with a three-wheel skate. Here is one example of what I mean. There is a musical number to start the film where a bunch of skaters cruise around the street. At one point they skate by a couple making out on top of a dumpster. A dumpster? Oh how romantic. It's just thrown in there like director Mark L. Lester said on the morning of the shoot, "Hey you extras go make out on that dumpster. That will be funny. And we have a dumpster available." There are so many moments like this where bad choices seem to be being made on the fly. Bad jokes. Bad shots. Bad plotting. Bad acting. It's clunky, broke and makes everything fall down.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
