Les Challengers

Yes, I rated this a 7 out of a 10....I only gave it a 7 because I haven't seen it since I was 7 years old......don't know if it's the 10 I used to think it was hee hee I loved Roller Boogie hee hee...I must have watched that movie a million times when I was a kid.

When I was a kid I also didn't care about the plot...All I thought was beaches, skating, pretty girl, pretty boy...happy ending.

I'm afraid that if I see it now I'll be supremely disappointed by my childhood innocence like I was with Saturday Night Fever...whew...I had no idea what was going on there until I saw it when I got older..again I had tunnel vision as a kid. I could only think about the dancing.

If you want to see Linda Blair not controlled by the devil and have some campy fun...go for it!!!! Don't be a snob:)

I know this movie isn't all that great. But It's not all that bad either. Linda Blair is the ONLY star in this flick and I like her in this flick. She's cute and she has money and she's not spoiled ( much ) and she has beautiful clothes. Unless you are a fan of either roller skating , roller disco or Linda Blair , you probably won't think this one is all that great. I'll rate this one 5 / 10

It'an innocent final 70s movie, where Linda Blair moves to skate with her boyfriend, expert roller skater Jim Bray and her friends making a plan to safe the disco palace where a devilish business man tries to build a Shopping Mall there. At the end of the night is the roller skating championship. Evertything must go perfect. The movie is bad, but you cannot denied to be amazed about the disco music, the roller skates and Linda. There's innocence in this movie. This kids loves sport, to hangout with girls not only for sex and loves have fun drinking a soda in the roller boogie place. This are times hard to get now, and the nostalgia wins a 10. Maybe will bore some, but still got it's cheesy magic.

Directed by Mark L. Lester.

I have seen this movie dozens of times and rate it as one of the best cult movies ever made. Great soundtrack featuring a song by Cher. A must see for fans of the late seventies. Linda Blair is a rebellious rich kid who falls in love with an ambitious, poor street skater. Together they thwart a mafia plan to close the local skating rink where a skating competition is going to be held. Amazing skating sequences featuring Venice Beach locals doing their thing. Hilarious and completely unbelievable street chase scene with limos vs. skaters...must see it to believe it. I was especially impressed with the performance of Jim Bray, who plays Linda Blair's love interest. Bray was cast because he was an actual champion skater of his day and he did admirably well in his acting debut. Not only is he an amazing skater but also comes off with an honest and believable acting style and he will remind any 30 something of someone they knew in highschool. The plot may be predictable and the dialog is somewhat canned and badly edited, but this movie captures that carefree, feel good era that has long gone by.

This one is a complete hoot. I caught this low-budget, formulaic 1979 film this past weekend on the big screen at the fully packed Castro Theater in San Francisco as part of a roller-disco midnight madness program. The crowd went wild at every absurd turn of the plot, and it's no wonder. Directed by potboiler specialist Mark L. Lester, this ultimate cheese of a roller disco musical avoids a permanent home in the video junk heap simply because of the sheer idiocy of the storyline and the wealth of unintentional humor permeating the film. There are movies that are intentionally vile and not worthy of reviewing, but this one is actually full of good spirits albeit with nothing in the way of taste, wit or common sense.

In what has to be the steepest career free-fall for a former Oscar nominee, an extremely nubile, twenty-year old Linda Blair stars as Terry Barkley, a prodigious flautist on her way to Juilliard, who tires of being ignored by her wealthy, 90210-based parents and decides to run away for a whole night. Upon meeting Bobby James in Venice Beach, the king of the disco-driven roller skaters, she decides she wants to learn some moves to win the big roller boogie contest at Jammer's, the local roller disco rink. My favorite plot point is Bobby's aspiration to become an Olympic roller skating gold medalist...even though no one tells him it isn't an Olympic event. Of course, Terry is rich, Bobby is poor, and consequently, romantic sparks are inevitable. Complications, however, occur when a thuggish land developer blackmails Jammer to sell his rink, so he can raze the building and build a shopping mall. The rest of the plot is not worth disclosing except to say that it is as preposterous as the convoluted set-up, and thanks to the wooden acting, horrendous dialogue and hilarious skating sequences, it makes for grade-A camp entertainment.

In skin-tight leotards and enough make-up to scare off a Santa Monica Boulevard hooker, Blair makes a sincere attempt at portraying Terry's teen-aged angst. Of course, it helps her professional standing that she is playing opposite real-life roller skating champion Jim Bray, a non-actor who was cast as Bobby only because the producers could not find a leading man who could actually skate. Innately geeky, the never-to-be-seen-again Bray certainly tries hard, though he is defeated by the film's numerous skating sequences which have been inserted so we can be impressed by his expertise. Instead, they provide the film's biggest laughs - the opening where he leads dozens of fellow skaters to the boardwalk to the strains of Cher's disco-diva anthem, "Hell on Wheels"; the ridiculous chase sequence through the streets of Venice where Terry and Bobby are chased unsuccessfully by a speeding car; the concluding roller boogie contest (of course); and in what has to be the absolute nadir, a solo skating number full of cornball treacle dedicated to the drunken Jammer.

Familiar faces from the baby-boomer TV generation dot the supporting cast, among them Beverly Garland ("Scarecrow and Mrs. King" and "My Three Sons") and Roger Perry ("The Facts of Life") as Terry's parents; and Mark Goddard ("Lost in Space") as the villainous land developer. If all that is not enough, there are other lures to consider - the blaring disco music; the groovy, circa-1979 clothes; the forced slapstick (in particular, a fruit-throwing mêlée and a very non-spontaneous pool dunking at a garden party). It's hard to think of a movie more execrable, yet the film has an endearing charm for all its misguided inanity. It's worthwhile just for the unintended guffaws. In the 1979-80 holy trinity of roller disco cinema, "Xanadu" may be "Gone With the Wind" and "Skatetown U.S.A." may be "West Side Story", but this one must certainly be "Citizen Kane".