Roller Boogie

Oh, the difficult lot of poor girls from rich families who in formulaic eighties flicks fall under the spell of popular fads and rebel against their strait-laced parents with daddy’s gold credit card in their pocket. Before the unfortunate Lucinda Dickey had to breakdance her way to happiness in Cannon Films’ Breakin’, Linda Blair skated the exact same trajectory with the obtrusively mugging Jim Bray in the obviously less successful yet arduously annoying Roller Boogie. Hollywood’s attempt to line its pockets on the back of the putative roller disco fad falls apart primarily due to the pair of central characters. Few people can endure 100 minutes of watching a whiney little bitch who is upset that her rich parents went on vacation without her and a simpleton with a ’frowho is convinced that he is the greatest thing on roller skates and an irresistible swinger, so he fawns over the heroine only because she had the nerve to reject him. Director Mark L. Lester, who subsequently made several key entries in the Pantheon of Trash in the 1980s, attempts to give the whole thing a dynamic form here and there, but whenever the roller-skate wheels stop turning and the unbearable characters come to the forefront, the film suddenly transforms from an amusingly goofy bit of kitsch into a burdensome test of tolerance, where the audience’s sympathies shift to the side of the antagonists who want to raze the roller disco to the ground. Actually, faced with the qualities of Roller Boogie, it can be considered that the brief era of roller disco movies was not a misjudgment of the market on the part of Hollywood (as Richard Nowell writes in his study Hollywood Don’t Skate), but rather a targeted intervention that had the purpose of killing off this bizarre subculture by evoking in viewers intense negative feelings toward its adherents. (13.07.2018)