Roller Town is a campy parody that is laughably excessive
Roller Town ★ 1/2
Starring: Mark Little, Scott Vrooman, Kalya Lorette Playing in English at Forum cinema Parents’ guide: Sexual situations, coarse language
A new Canadian comic voice is about to burst onto the national movie scene, which would be terrific news if it was a funnier one. Alas, judging from Roller Town — its motion picture debut, to give it a grand name — the Halifax troupe Picnicface is a hit-andmiss operation.
Roller Town is a sort of campy parody that uses the laughable excesses of disco (or rather of roller disco, which is even more laughably excessive) for a lot of offthe-wall humour and cheap chuckles.
It’s 1963 and Leo (Mark Little), the gawky roller-skating star of Brookfield, must lead the fight against a bunch of gangsters who are plotting to close the roller rink and install video machines.
This lends itself to all manner of naughty fun about the vapidity of the era, chiefly the film’s creative centrepiece, a Bee Gees-type group called The Boogaloos who appear in the rainbow sky, dressed in gold lamé with their shirts unbuttoned to here, and singing faux dance songs with unprintable lyrics.
This isn’t exactly the comic highlight of Roller Town, but it gives you an idea. Mostly, director Andrew Bush and his co-writers — all Picnicface members — go for the quick hits, which come across with a low-budget clunkiness that settles for endearing rather than hilarious. Thus, stupid thug Beef (Pat Thorn- ton), holds a picture in front of a man he is intimidating and says, “Is this our wife?” The man replies — quite correctly — “That’s Audrey Hepburn,” to which Beef says, “It’d be a shame if something were to happen to her.”
This quality of almostfunny per meates Roller Town, which races along through 80 minutes as a mock defence of all things disco — “disco roller skating is … awesome!,” Leo says in the epiphany — dressed in tight shorts and told with the rat-a-tat timing of sketch comedy.
Characters come and go, often carrying giant boom boxes or screwing their faces into presumed expressions of cranky moral disapproval to say things like, “Disco is the music of poverty and crime.”
Director Bush adds touches of the era, such as split screens or giant letters across the screen (“Woo Hoo Hoo”) that are only slight exaggerations of a filmmaking style that was pretty self-aware at the time, rendering the satire a case of shooting fish in a polyester barrel.
All in all, I think it’s supposed to be funny because it’s stupid, but sometimes stupid just sits there on its own, digging the funk.