Rollercoaster

Pop quiz hot shot.  There’s a bomb in an amusement park with thousands of lives at risk.  You can’t empty the park or the scumbag will blow it, you can’t shut the park down or he’ll blow it and you don’t know where the bomb is or what the bad guy looks like.  What do you do?  Well if you’re Harry Calder then you tell the bomber to go fuck himself.

Summer is just about here and I thought it would be cool to look at a seasonal movie.  When you think of summer you think of beaches and heat waves and barbeques ‘n shit.  Amusement parks also belong in there and this 70’s thriller is a helluva lot of fun.

Timothy Bottoms (That’s My Bush!, The Last Picture Show, Uncle Sam) plays Young Man (we never learn his name) and he’s a mad bomber.  Why he exclusively targets theme parks we don’t know.  But he’s a quiet plotting type guy.  He remains calm, collected, confident and talks (and even sounds) like HAL from 2001.  And yes it’s true, he really is a young man.  That wasn’t just some made up bullshit that was supposed to be ironic.

George Segal (Just Shoot Me!, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is the mustachioed Harry Calder who’s a ride inspector.  He gets called in when these amusement rides have some sort of major malfunction like getting blown up by a fucking bomb.  He’s charismatic but overall uninterested and unimpressed with just about everything.  Like Young Man he also plays it cool for the most part but he’s also trying to quit smoking so he’s a little cantankerous.  And Segal, oddly enough, is half of why this movie is so enjoyable.  His I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude is really badass even though he’s not physically imposing.  Well, and the very Jewish Long Islandy accent doesn’t help either but just go with me on this.  He makes you feel like you’re in good hands and that he’s a match for the bomber.  This movie makes the job of a ride inspector look just as exciting and dangerous as the job of a police detective and Calder has the mind-set to match.  Now the bomber isn’t physically intimidating either but you do believe that he’ll blow shit up if he has to.  You believe that Calder has the knowhow and the guts to get this guy.  And you want to see Young Man go down because he’s a coward.  He’s a skinny punk that wants to kill people impersonally from a distance and isn’t man enough to go after his targets face to face.

So the reason why I did that Speed intro was because sometimes this movie does have a bit of that feel to it.  There are two particular times when Calder has to go to an amusement park and meet the bomber’s requests while a team of cops try and figure out where the bomb is behind the scenes.  This is also a lot like Die Hard with a Vengeance where McClane and Zeus have to go around Manhattan doing whatever Simon Gruber tells them to do (this gag was also used in Dirty Harry).  Calder is forced to run around an amusement park and ride rides, play games and buy a stupid looking neon green bucket hat with his name sloppily stitched on it.  The whole time Calder’s pissed off that he was dragged into this.  He’s not scared he’s annoyed.

This film is smart enough to play to the actors’ strengths and it doesn’t feel like anyone’s out of place.  Segal isn’t some brute that’s gonna go around beating people up and that makes sense for someone who’s a ride inspector.  I’m not saying I wouldn’t have liked to see Charles Bronson in this role ‘cause that would have been really cool but this isn’t what this film was going for.  It wants to be taken seriously.  Calder uses his brains and his mouth to help him through the situations presented to him.  There’s even a scene where he’s on the phone with Young Man who tells him to get his ass to the amusement park but Calder just brushes him off and hangs up on him.  And Bottoms works as the bomber because he isn’t a tough guy either.  It’s that impersonal thing that I mentioned.  He’s just some nut that wants to hurt people and get a lot of money.

There are no fist fights or shootouts.  Like I said before, this movie is serious and was going for a real world type of scenario.  And that’s the second half of what I love about this film.  Let me sum up the plot for you once more.  A man goes around to different amusement parks and blows them up.  On paper that sounds cool and it also sounds like a Seagal (not George Segal, Steven Seagal) or Stallone vehicle.  But this was before Seagal’s time and also before Stallone did First Blood and immortalized himself in action movie history.  So if you want to make this movie in the late 70’s what approach do you use?  You don’t have much of a choice other than to make it a serious thriller.  This picture is really interesting because I think I can safely say that if this was made in the mid to late 80’s then it would’ve been a straight up action flick with a cop instead of a ride inspector (or maybe not but he would definitely carry a gun and know how to use it) and he would have a haunted past because the bomber killed the cop’s wife and child at an amusement park some years earlier, his superior officer would yell at him to stay off the case, the bad guy would be a burlier dude that’s more maniacal but his motivation would still be unexplained, there would be many many more explosions and there would be shootouts on roller coasters.  It has the perfect makings of a great action movie.  Imagine a whole movie of that scene in Shakedown where Sam Elliot fights a bad guy on the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island.

But this was made in a different time period.  People weren’t into that kinda shit yet.  1977 was right at the end of the down and dirty more reality less fantasy movie kick that had been going on since the late 60’s.  Bonnie and Clyde may have started it but others like Bullitt and Easy Rider made clear that this is what audiences wanted to see.  It continued on into the 70’s with films like The French Connection, The Godfather and Badlands.  But in 1977 Star Wars came out and that changed everything.  People were into fantasy again.  But this movie came out at the cusp of that change.  At this point they still wanted something thoughtful and pretty realistic.  I think a good example of doing movies in different time periods and playing on what those audiences want to see are Yojimbo and Last Man standing.  It’s the same story but one was done in the 60’s and the other in the 90’s so one is slower and the focus is more on the characters and the overall story while the other has a dude get shot to shit with two guns and he flies back like fifty feet in slow motion.  Man, imagine if they remade Rollercoaster with Bruce Willis, Christopher Walken and Walter Hill.

As it is though, this is a really fun movie that moves pretty quickly.  There’s really only one subplot and it’s not even focused on that much so it’s mostly mad bomber thrills.  This would be a good way to kick off the summer season.  It just might make you think twice about going to an amusement park.

Oh and why the fuck is the title of this movie Rollercoaster?  There should be a space between “roller” and “coaster”.  That’s really weird.