Guilty Pleasure No. 97: Roller Boogie (dir by Mark L. Lester)

1979’s Roller Boogie opens with an impromptu parade of roller skaters rolling across the Venice Beach boardwalk. They don’t care about any stuffy people who think that they should be in school or working behind a counter. They’re young, they’re free! One of them wears rainbow suspenders and juggles while skating. (I’ve noticed that every roller skating movie seems to feature at least one juggler in rainbow suspenders. Strangely, you never see them in real life.)

This is followed by a scene of a teenage rich girl Terry Barkley (Linda Blair) getting ready for her day in her poster decorated bedroom. The camera zooms in for a close-up as she picks just the right chunky bracelet to wear.

In other words, it doesn’t get much more late 70s/early 80s than Roller Boogie.

The plot is pretty simple. Terry meets the king of the roller skaters, Bobby James (Jim Bray). Bobby is a kid from a working class background and he dreams of the day that his roller skating skills will lead to him competing in the Olympics. Terry is rich and she has a snooty best friend (Kimberly Beck) and parents (Beverly Garland and Roger Perry) who are planning on sending her to Julliard. Despite everyone saying that they’re from different worlds, Terry and Bobby enter the roller disco contest together! Cue the montage!

Unfortunately, a crooked businessman (Mark Goddard) is planning on bulldozing the skating rink. Can Bobby and the other skaters defeat the businessman and his gangster pals? Even when guns are pulled on them, Bobby and his friends refuse to give up. Myself, I’d just find another skating rink. I mean, it’s Venice Beach in 1979. It’s hard to believe that there’s only one place to go.

The gangster subplot feels out of place, a misguided attempt to bring some action to a perfectly acceptable teen romance. This was Jim Bray’s only film role and he wasn’t a particularly good actor but he and Linda Blair had enough natural chemistry to bring some charm to the film. Linda Blair, for her part, skates as if the fate of the world depended upon it and she seems to enjoy playing a relatively happy character for once. It’s totally predictable, a bit dumb at times but it’s still likable enough. Ultimately, it’s such a product of its time — look at the clothes, look at the hair, listen to the slang — that it becomes rather fascinating to watch. This is a movie that you watch and say, “So, that’s what 1979 was like!”