bayou52

and the unsettling and lurid feeling it cast over me has never gone away. "Sin eating" was a ritual practiced during the late middle ages whereupon a professional sin eater would, for a purse of coins, consume a sumptuous meal virtually atop the body of someone who had already or was about to gasp their last breath, thereby "consuming" his sins and allowing him entrance into heaven. This was the subject matter of an entire 1 hour episode of Rod Serling's "Night Gallery" and starred Richard Thomas as the pitiable teenage son of a line of male sin eaters who is promised escape from his terrible heritage, only to be starved, beguiled and manipulated by his mother into "eating" the sins of his dying father after all. The episode was expertly crafted and succeeded completely in capturing both the psychological and economic depression of an impoverished family caught literally between the devil and the deep blue sea in a time of ignorance and oppression when a person's faith kept him in poverty via promise of purchase into paradise. The hollow look in the starving boy's eyes as he finally realized his mother's betrayal, paused, and then began ravenously ripping into the cooked flesh of the enormous feast she had prepared, his father's corpse beneath it all, will remain with me forever. The theme being the same, you might want to pass "The Order" up if truly depraved subject matter gets your goat (no pun intended).

I gave this flick a shame faced 7 (a baseline 6 + 1 because I've thoroughly enjoyed it...twice!) I saw it first in 1991, a full 5 years before I learned to roller blade myself (at the ripe old age of 44) and again last night. I think the mistake made by those rating it so lowly was in taking it seriously. It certainly didn't take itself seriously. Not with lines like (paraphrase) [after a criminal is shot by a cop] "thank God we could take care of him here. I hate court". Or with newspaper headlines that read "Germany buys Poland". Or with a radio newscast describing Mexican INS agents rounding up and deporting American fruit pickers who had illegally entered their country to find work. Any sense of reality exited my mind as I watched them do everything in those skates, I, myself, having gotten hopelessly bogged down in the neutral ground trying to cross the street in my blades at City Park in New Orleans. The movie also had a refreshingly original take on the "doomed future" theme. Instead of the grim setting being a post nuclear apocalypse, we have a wasteland created, instead, by the crash of the American stock market. And this well explains the sad state of affairs (no money for police, a greatly weakened government, extensive homelessness, etc.) that is the backdrop for the film. The rollerboys seemed to be a blurry composite of all the evils of mankind since the beginning of time...racial hatred, greed megalomania, anti-semitism...you name it. The visage of the rollerboy gang materializing from the end of a dark tunnel, gliding effortlessly in white trench coats and black rollerblades, their arms swinging mightily in unison immediately called to mind goose stepping Nazis. The two undercover cops, who seemed to literally dwell in their van, making off the cuff quips about the rollerboys were a hoot. True, the acting was, at best mediocre but had it been excellent it would have spoiled the film. Occasional lapses into the melodramatic only added savor to the stew. Much of the dialog was so bad it was not only good but great. I guess this movie will remain one of my guilty pleasures. If it comes on again...I'll watch it again. I only wish Corey Haim hadn't grown up so they could make Rollerboys 2.