ROLLER BLADE (1986)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

As of this writing there have been six sequels to writer-director Donald H. Jackson's bizarre future-vision. I personally preferred his work on 1988's HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN, but I must admit that ROLLER BLADE is the more boldly demented concept.

So it's far in some post-apoc future, and all we know about the ruined cityscapes is that both good guys and bad guys constantly travel on roller skates. (Not a roller blade anywhere to be seen.) Sandra Crosse (Suzanne Solari) is supposed to be one of the good ones, and she's more or less the featured heroine. This may be because twice in the film she shows the uncanny ability to balance on one rollerskated foot while kicking assailants with the other skated foot, which is probably a non-existent talent. 

Sandra (whose character would only appear once more in the first sequel) is more or less the outsider through whom the viewer meets the most extraordinary society of this future world: the Bod Sisters, a group of hot nuns who zoom around on roller skates but who refuse to kill their enemies. After Sandra is injured, she seeks sanctuary with the nunnery, and they use a magical crystal to heal her wounds. Sandra then joins the flock.

However, the Bod Sisters have an enemy, an evil mutant named Doctor Saticoy, who wants to steal their crystal to tap its darker powers. Saticoy is certainly one of the more memorable villains of cheap eighties DTV flicks, for he not only wears a metal Doctor Doom mask, one of his hands has been mutated into a talking creature, as if a living hand-puppet had become grafted to his wrist.

The only name actor in the film is Michelle Bauer, but since she was a couple of years away from becoming a cult performer, she was probably only in the cast because she, like the majority of the women, were willing to get naked frequently. Perhaps needless to say, all of the acting is bad, and made worse by the fact that Jackson didn't record any dialogue, but looped in dubbed lines later on.

The one interesting thing about BLADE is that Jackson plays his absurd premise straight all the way, which is why I categorize the movie as adventure rather than comedy. Oh, and for once it's not the nudity alone that sold the series to its fans looking for the next "so bad it's good" hit. Certainly there were dozens if not hundreds of softcore skin films in the eighties alone-- and how many of them generated six sequels?