So you like shitty films, eh?  You find great hilarity in movies so bad they're good, do you?  Enjoy a good chuckle at straight to video horror starring members of the original Star Trek cast, you say?  I know what you mean.  I was like you once too.  But that was before one unforgettable day last month.  That was before everything changed.

 

That was before the Roller Blade Seven. 

 

Many, many years ago I walked into a room to find a group of my friends watching and laughing at The Roller Blade Seven.  I joined in and had a right chortle at the obviously micro budget nonsense taking place on screen, before we switched the video off and headed off into town a few minutes later.  I quickly forgot about the film, until a year or so ago when it popped into my head quite out of the blue and I decided to try to track it down to review.

 

I have since come to realise that this was merely my time to think about finding a copy of the Roller Blade Seven.  I now believe this thought occurs to everyone at some point in their lifetime, regardless of whether they'd ever heard of the film before that point.  It's some dark cosmic power at work, and one I intend to dedicate my life to stopping.

 

Thanks to ebay I managed to track down my very own VHS copy of the film and carelessly left it lying around, unaware at that point of the raw, unbridled evil residing within the case.  Had I only known back then what awaited me things could have been different.  I could have been more prepared.  I certainly wouldn't have sat down to watch it alone that night, and if for some reason I had done, there's no way I would have left the remote control a few inches out of reach the way I did. 

 

My plan was to do a full blow by blow account of the story here, but I have chosen not to do so, due to the following reasons:

1. There is no story of any description whatsoever.
2. I'd end up killing myself.
   

The best I can do is give you a vague summary of the plot as I understand it, and try to do so in a way which doesn't cause your head or mine to explode.  It won't be easy, but then nothing worthwhile ever is.  Nor is reviewing the Roller Blade Seven.

 

If you're suitably braced then, I shall continue.  A final word of warning, however - we are about to walk down a dark and unpleasant path together, and I can't make any promises we'll make it out alive.  I will do my best to protect you, but there are things lurking ahead so awful I may not be able to keep you safe.  Only if you are sure you're ready to learn about the single most appalling film ever to be released should you even consider continuing.  Are you prepared to be plunged headfirst into an atrocity to rival the Holocaust?  Are you strong enough to have your very understanding of reality forever changed?  Do you have a trusted friend or relative standing by to close the browser window should it all start to prove too much?  If you answered no to any of those question then you're not ready, my friend, and no matter how much you may want to read on you should turn back now.  Go take a walk in the park.  Enjoy the sunshine and fresh air.  Take the day off, go home and kiss your wife and kids.  You've had a lucky escape.  Maybe one day you will be ready, but that day is not today.

 

Those of you still with me take my hand and hold on tight.  May God have mercy on our souls. 

 

 

Now I know what you're thinking - you're thinking "Jesus, Baz, could you have put any less effort into a title image for the review?"  Well don't blame me - that's an actual screenshot of the title sequence to this film.  It alternates between the white text on black background above and black text on a white background.  Already you begin to realise I'm am not exaggerating the shittyness of this video, I can tell. 

 

Let's press on by looking at the blurb on the back of the box.  That should be a nice gentle introduction to the concept of the movie.  Or rather it would be if it bore more than a passing resemblance to the events depicted in the film.

 

For starters the back of the box proclaims: "The Year is 2017 A.D.  Machine Rule The World."

 

Only they don't.  Unless you class people on rollerblades as machines, which is something of a stretch even for The Roller Blade Seven.  In fact I don't recall seeing any machines in the movie whatsoever, aside from the lead character's motorbike which gets abandoned five minutes into the plot.  Let's overlook this basic error for now and take in the rest of the box blurb.

Yes, so that should have been warning enough not to go any further, but I paid the niggling doubts I was having at this point no heed and slotted the tape into VCR.

 

Immediately I was knocked off my feet by the standard of acting in the opening scenes.  Before we get to that though, let's meet Sparrow, the Queen of Light.

 

 

That's your beautiful enchantress right there, looking for all the world like a KKK member at the beach.  Despite being responsible for maintaining the fragile balance of the entire world she appears to have no special abilities whatsoever other than wearing a hat which makes her look like Wizbit and not appearing too self conscious about it.  Also, all of Sparrow's lines are spoken by a male voice approximately four seconds before she says them.  I have no idea why.

 

I would apologise for how dark these pictures are, but since I played no part whatsoever in the lighting of the film, I'm not going to. 

 

Sparrow is quickly kidnapped and mercifully whisked away before she can say more than a dozen words.  Unfortunately our respite doesn't last long, as the abduction prompts The Master of Light - a priest in a Kiss-Me-Quick hat - to summon Sparrow's brother, "Hawk" to rescue her.

 

When the call comes in from The Master of Light Hawk is sitting sipping drinks with a couple of his lady friends in a swimming pool.  He is fully dressed.  Again, I have no idea why. 

 

I'm tired of typing The Master of Light every time I mention the guy now, so from here on in we're going to call him Bernie, despite the fact this isn't his name. 

 

Those of you expressly interested in the route Hawk takes to get to the room where Bernie is hanging about are in for a real treat, because a full six minutes of the film are dedicated to shots of the hero walking up stairs and along corridors on his way to visit the hat wearing holy man.  Seriously, six minutes of a guy just walking.  Six minutes.

 

When Hawk eventually arrives he and Bernie sit down for a good old fashioned chinwag.   For reasons best known to himself,  director Donald G Jackson seems to have instructed both actors in this scene to count to ten in their heads before speaking any of their lines.  As a result we're presented with the most laborious, excruciating conversation in cinematic history, punctuated by Hawk going "Hmmm" more emphatically than anyone has ever gone "Hmmm" before.

 

Once the conversation is over we are treated to another extensive sequence of Hawk making his way to another location - this time the entrance to the Wheelzone.  Then, just as he finally arrives at his destination, the scene shifts to somewhere else entirely, where a scantilly clad dominatrix is jabbing a fat bloke with a stick.  Later we will come to discover that the fat bloke in question is 1950's music legend, the Big Bopper, who is wandering around looking for Richie Valens and Buddy Holly.  Once again, I have no idea why.  Fortunately it has no bearing on the plot whatsoever, so it can be wiped from our collective memories without fear of later confusion.

 

Just as the dominatrix - let's call her Mary - is riding the Big Bopper around like a small horse, Hawk passes by and the two have a brief and wholly nonsensical conversation, inexplicably intercut with shots of a caped Joe Estevez dancing.  Joe Estevez, as you may have guessed, is the brother of Emelio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, and Joe quite astonishingly manages to be less charismatic than either of them in his random appearances in this film.

 

Immediately after this Hawk is attacked by three samurai sword wielding rollerbladers, who he dispatches in seconds in what is unquestionably the second most boring fight sequence of all time.  I don't think I mentioned that Hawk has a samurai sword with him, did I?  I probably should have, it's quite important.  Relatively speaking.

 

Some more shit happens that leaves you staring at the screen asking what you've done to deserve this life, before Hawk catches up with Sparrow and her abductors.  We then get to watch the first most boring fight sequence of all time which should by rights only last about thirty seconds, but which actually lasts about eight minutes due to the same sequences being shown again and again and again and again and again and again and again until sick comes out your nose. 

 

We're not talking John Woo style quick repetition of impressive moves here either.   Each and every shot of the fight - some of them lasting twenty seconds or so - is repeated about four times in succession.  You want to watch the same shot of Hawk stepping in front of the setting sun and drawing his sword fourteen times in a row?  You got it.  You want to then see the same shot nine more times about twenty seconds later when the fight is actually in progress?  You've come to the right place!  You start to realise while watching bits like this that the film makers must have shot about twenty minutes of footage and just filled the other seventy minutes by repeating the same bits over and over again.  It's just one of the many reasons I wish them all dead.

 

 

A guy in a WWII gas mask shows up and leads Hawk to an old woman who feeds him closed cup mushrooms which - I think - cause him to hallucinate.  To be truthful I myself might have been hallucinating the entire scene, which involves Hawk and the old woman dancing about, touching statues, and snogging the face off one another.  It's quite unsettling.  I mean Jesus, Hawk, she's sixty five if she's a day. 

 

Old woman says some cryptic things which can't be made out over the accompanying sitar music, Hawk goes "hmmm" with renewed vigour and enthusiasm, and Bernie turns up for a bit of a dance and to stand laughing like a fucking maniac for a solid minute of screen time.

 

By this point some of you may be wondering why the film is called The Roller Blade Seven when there quite patently aren't two of them, much less seven.  I have no answers to give you, my friend.  There's another couple join in the quest later on, but seven?  No.  Never seven, nor even close to seven. 

 

In the next scene Sparrow is killed.  In the one after she's alive and talking to Frank Stallone, brother of Sylvester.  I don't know what they talk about because I blacked out for a while, but I know the scene ends with her taking off most of her clothes and dancing like someone's mum at a wedding as Frank Stallone stares at her and grinds his teeth.

 

There's some more shit with the Big Bopper which we'd all be best off ignoring, and then we meet another two characters who may or may not have some semblance of reason for existing.

 

 

The guy on the left is a clown with a rubber baseball bat.  The guy on the right constantly plays the banjo.  Hey, I'm just reporting the facts here people, don't ask me to explain any of it.  They meet some woman in a red bikini and all have a bit of a dance before she skates off.

 

Some other stuff I can't even bring myself to recollect happens, then we get to see Hawk fighting with Frank Stallone.  Taking a rather groundbreaking approach to continuity, the director has chosen to shoot the wide shots of the fight at Location 1 with Frank Stallone in Costume 1, then move to Location 2 in order to shoot the close-up dialogue shots, dressing Stallone in Costume 2 somewhere along the way.  Costume 1 is a suit of armour.  Costume 2 is a hooded cape.  It shouldn't be that easy to confuse the two, but The Roller Blade Seven manages to pull it off.  Way to fucking go The Roller Blade Seven.

 

The scene ends with Hawk running away.  So far he's impressing no-one.

 

A previously unseen character then teaches Hawk to rollerblade in a sequence which contains no dialogue and which lasts for a little over a month.  There's only so many times you can watch a guy falling on his ass before it starts to wear you down, and I confess my will crumbled and I fast forwarded through this scene after about the hundredth badly acted pratfall.  Plot wise I don't think I missed anything too crucial, unless seeing ass hit pavement a thousand times in a row is vital to understanding the story.

 

Hawk then meets the clown and the guy with the banjo, and they have a short and gobsmackingly unimpressive fight which sees Hawk fall on his ass another fifty times.  The battle is mercifully interrupted by the arrival of twenty other people on rollerblades wielding rubber weapons and wearing car mats painted silver for armour.  Every member of the group starts to fight among themselves, and so Hawk and the clown skate off, now firm friends.  I have no further information about the guy with the banjo at this time. 

 

The chick in the red bikini from earlier comes dangerously close to fighting some ninjas, but Hawk turns up and scares them off with his very presence.  They probably didn't want to be too close when one of his "hmmms" went off.

 

Now joined by Red Bikini Chick and the Clown, Hawk skates through the same tunnel ten times, before fighting a big guy with a pointy helmet in what would have been the most boring fight sequence of all time, were it not for the fact that a random naked woman wanders in half way through and stands in the background jiggling her tits.  

 

I should probably point out that there has been no dialogue in the film since Hawk said "Hmmm" in the scene with Frank Stallone, and nor will there be until he says "I hate banjos" a few scenes later when Banjo Guy turns up out of the blue and entertains the trio with a five minute up tempo solo, only to have his throat slit by some wheeled assailant before he can reach the big finale.  There is no doubting the fact that the masked stranger who skates past and literally cuts Banjo Guy short is the true hero of this film, even if it is shown eleven times in succession from exactly the same angle.

 

He also appears to punch the Clown in the throat too, causing him to fall over.  This too is shown around nine times more than is strictly necessary.

 

Bikini Chick and Hawk both skate off in different directions after the attacker.  Both catch up with him.  Or rather, both catch up with different versions of him.  Or something.  They both end up fighting someone wearing the same clothes as the attacker anyway, put it that way.  Man, it's times like this I wish I ran a site about breeding gerbils or something.  Say what you like, at least nine times out of ten you know what the fuck is going on with gerbils. 

 

I'd like to be able to go into detail about the rest of the film but I can't.  From here on in there's a whole lot of fighting between the Roller Blade Three and other characters who may or may not have appeared previously in the story.  During all the fighting we see Sparrow is still alive and still being led across the desert by her captors, with no mention of the earlier semi-naked dancing incident.  Hawk catches up with them and wipes the kidnappers, only to find Sparrow dead on the sand, despite no-one having had any opportunity to have done anything to her during the fighting.  I can only assume she took her own life rather than be forced to play any further part in the story.  Hawk demonstrates his grief by screaming in anguish for approximately an eighth of a second, before skating away.

 

Quite inexplicably after one battle the words "Utility Ninja" fill the screen for several seconds, before fading out again.  Yet again I have no idea why this happens.

 

Hawk and Bikini Chick get captured and taken to Pharaoh, who turns out to be some jibbering nutter in a wheelchair.  I have no clue whatsoever what happens to the Clown at this point, but he is never seen again, which is huge reason to celebrate on so many levels.

 

Bikini Chick is singled out for special attention and she finds herself stripped naked and covered in snakes.  Hawk, on the other hand, just has to stand around a bit.  Hardly seems fair really, considering Bikini Chick hasn't even taken her sword out yet.

 

From here on in it all descends further into madness than my fragile psyche can handle.  Lots of strobe lights herald the arrival from out of fucking nowhere of Bernie, who kills Frank Stallone, despite the fact Frank Stallone wasn't to the best of my knowledge anywhere in the immediate area.  The editing and shooting style get somewhat confusing here, but I think I'm right in saying that Bernie single handedly kills all the villains, begging the question why the fuck he didn't just go and do the job himself in the first place.  My guess is he staged the whole thing in order to see Bikini Chick with a cobra on her tits, but then I can't possibly hope to prove that in any way.

 

The day well and truly saved (despite the fact the entire mission was a failure as soon as Sparrow dropped dead) the heroes celebrate in style with a wedding.  Hawk takes Bikini Chick's hand in marriage, with Bikini Chick swapping her trademark bare asscheeks for an enormously puffy wedding dress.  They climb onto Hawk's bike and ride off into the sunset.

 

But oh no, what's this?  It's Joe Estevez driving a car and looking vaguely sinister!  Perhaps more astonishingly his passenger in the car is Bikini Chick, and she seems to have it in for Hawk and herself, who are riding the motorbike ahead.

 

I know, I know.  It's not like I didn't warn you, though.

 

Bikini Chick and Joe Estevez carry out a drive by shooting, killing Bikini Chick and leaving Hawk in the mood for revenge.  The film ends with Hawk drawing his sword and running off - on foot, mind - after the speeding car, leaving the film open for a sequel.  A sequel which does actually exist!  Had I needed any further proof of the non-existence of God there it is right there.

 

Now I know what some of you are going to be thinking.  You'll be thinking "Wow, that sounds terrible, I must get my hands on a copy of that!".  NO!  Do not consider this course of action under any circumstances.  While you may think that The Roller Blade Seven is a bad movie, and while the review may have given some hint of an indication of how bad it is, nothing can hope to convey how terrible a movie this actually is, and any attempts to view it will result in a deep rooted loathing of the medium of film.

 

Having watched The Roller Blade Seven in its entirety I have been forced to completely redefine my opinion on every other film I have ever seen in my life, and I've been left with little choice but to give howlers such as Batman & Robin and The Avengers two thumbs up due solely to the sheer, unwaivering awfulness of this unforgivable piece of cinematic dogshit.