George Segal and Richard Widmark have to stop a madman with a taste for exploding amusement park attractions in 1977's Rollercoaster. It's a '70s disaster movie with all the '70s disaster movie cliches, including the protagonist who picked the wrong week to stop smoking, the wife who doesn't understand how important her husband's job is, and a killer who seems intent on both impressing and humiliating the cops. The performances are good, though, and the opening has a hell of a disaster sequence.
The music's really overbearing. Every time, every time, it cuts to shots of the killer (Timothy Bottoms) we hear shrill, high tension violins. The opening sequence drags out a long time with this as he stalks an amusement park at night, alternating between him and shots of happy people with generic calliope music. I thought, "The payoff better be worth all this." And it was!
When the bomb goes off on the track, the cars fly off into the crowds and stands. It's really well done and totally convincing, You know, almost always, when someone falls off a cliff in a pre-cgi movie, you can clearly see it's a dummy and they must have used dummies here but they're totally undetectable. It's really a show stopper.
The movie never matches that moment again but it's not bad if you can forgive the cliches. Richard Widmark is always great and George Segal is solid. There's a nicely tense bomb diffusal scene. A young Helen Hunt is in the film as Segal's daughter.
No comments:
Post a Comment