When we think of seventies cinema, we tend to remember the edgier fare that came out of New Hollywood, with auteurs like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg becoming household names. But one of the biggest genres of the decade was actually the disaster movie, with films like The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and Earthquake dominating the box office.
Usually, these movies were star-studded spectacles centered around natural and man-made disasters, and audiences loved them. However, by the end of the decade, the genre was running on fumes, with studios having a hard time coming up with new disasters. That’s why later movies focused on wacky things like killer bee attacks in The Swarm.
But amid all the disaster movies of this era, a really terrific one was made in 1977 called Rollercoaster. And while Universal hoped it would become a summer blockbuster, the movie had the misfortune of arriving in theaters just as Star Wars was taking over the world (it suffered the same fate as William Friedkin’s Sorcerer).
Rollercoaster had a more Hitchcockian plot than usual, focusing on a mad bomber who blows up roller coasters at various amusement parks in an attempt to extort money from their owners. The amusement park operators, not wanting their businesses to go up in flames — literally — try to keep it quiet. Luckily, a plucky insurance investigator gets hip to what’s going on and helps them try to nab the bomber.
The movie is a star vehicle for George Segal, an actor probably best known to modern audiences for playing Gramps on The Goldbergs before he passed away a few years ago. During the seventies, he was a huge star, largely focusing on comedies like Fun with Dick and Jane and A Touch of Class.
Rollercoaster was a bit of a departure for him, but the movie didn’t perform particularly well at the box office.
Universal had hoped Rollercoaster would be a summer blockbuster, even giving it a special “Sensurround” soundtrack, which employed low-frequency sounds to literally make theater chairs vibrate. It was the same gimmick that had helped turn Earthquake into a major theatrical event a few years earlier.
Sadly, Rollercoaster hit theaters around the same time as a little movie you might have heard of called Star Wars. Compared to the adventures in a galaxy far, far away, a movie about amusement parks didn’t seem quite as exciting.
But it’s a nifty thriller, and one that deserves a lot more attention than it gets.
Now, Kino Lorber has given the film a beautiful 4K release (which you can get here), allowing audiences to rediscover this lost seventies gem.
Taking place in a time before the internet and social media, it’s almost quaint to see how the bombing of roller coasters is able to be hushed up. Were something like this to actually happen nowadays, amusement parks worldwide would be under immediate scrutiny. Take, for example, what happened just a few weeks ago when a roller coaster rider died in a freak accident, prompting safety concerns and ride closures. But the seventies were a different time.
Segal is terrific as a very everyman kind of hero, spending much of the movie trying to quit smoking while also juggling his home life as the divorced father of a teenager played by a young Helen Hunt.
What do you want to bet she ends up in the same amusement park threatened by the villain in the third act?
He’s not an action hero. He’s just a regular guy working in insurance who happens to be a bit smarter than everyone else around him. And that’s part of what makes the movie work so well. You can actually imagine someone like him getting caught up in this situation.
The film also has some quirky seventies moments, including an appearance by one of my favorite cult bands of all time, Sparks, who play themselves in an extended sequence where they perform at the park. At the time, they were trying to go mainstream, and their appearance is a fun little time capsule.
As usual for the genre, Rollercoaster has a great supporting cast, including Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda (in a tiny role), while Timothy Bottoms is chilling as the mad bomber.
Bottoms is especially effective because he doesn’t play the villain as some over-the-top psychopath. He’s calculating, cold, and disturbingly ordinary, which makes him all the more unsettling.
Indeed, the movie often feels more like a suspense thriller than a traditional disaster epic, and that’s one of the reasons it holds up so well.
The Kino Lorber disc is pretty stacked for such an obscure film, sporting no fewer than two commentary tracks.
Intriguingly, in addition to a modern soundtrack revamp in 5.1, it also has a recreation of the original Sensurround track in 2.1. There’s also an unrated cut of the film included (but only in standard 1080p), which features brief shots of gore that were trimmed to secure a PG rating but made it into the international release in some territories.
There’s also a short documentary about the disaster movie genre and Rollercoaster‘s place in it, along with an interview with the movie’s writer.
It’s a terrific package for a movie that has largely fallen through the cracks over the years.
If you’re a fan of the era, I highly recommend checking out Rollercoaster, even if disaster movies aren’t your thing.
It works really well as a grounded thriller, and Segal’s performance is top-shelf. Watching it now, I’m reminded of how much I miss the kind of everyman heroes Hollywood used to build movies around. Segal isn’t particularly tough or physically imposing, and he doesn’t suddenly transform into an action star. He’s just a smart, decent guy trying to do his job.
We need more heroes like him in movies.
And while Star Wars understandably captured the world’s imagination in 1977, Rollercoaster is proof that some of the movies left in its wake are still worth discovering nearly fifty years later.