One of the cool things about growing up in the eighties and nineties was that, due to the limited choices we had available to us as far as TV went (in the days before streaming), we would end up watching movies we’d never necessarily check out on our own. The randomness was part of the fun. I ended up discovering a lot of cool movies on cable that way, and one that I’ve always enjoyed is the little-discussed seventies disaster movie/thriller Rollercoaster, starring the late George Segal, which is now getting a pretty lavish 4K Blu-ray release.
Back in the seventies, disaster movies were all the rage. Movies like The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno and Earthquake were huge hits. But the genre started to die out towards the end of the decade, as many of the “big” disasters had already been done, so you had stuff like The Swarm (killer bees) or When Time Ran Out (volcanoes) in theaters — and audiences stayed away.
But Rollercoaster was a great one, in that it married the disaster genre to a more Hitchcockian style. The premise is great — a mad bomber starts derailing rollercoasters with people on them and blackmails amusement park owners to pay up. A plucky insurance investigator, played by seventies everyman George Segal, becomes embroiled in the case, as the amusement park owners — recklessly — keep their parks open despite the risk of bombings. Segal was a big star at the time, albeit mostly in comedies, with this being a change of pace for him. Modern audiences probably know him best for his long-running role as Gramps on The Goldbergs.
While the premise is a bit hard to swallow now (one rollercoaster bombing would go super viral and become international news), it was the seventies, so you can kinda understand how the amusement park owners might be able to keep such a story buried. Whatever the case, it’s a super fun flick, with Segal great as the regular-guy hero, who, in addition to cracking the case, also spends the entire movie trying to quit smoking (his daughter is played by a young Helen Hunt). It had a pretty big cast, with Henry Fonda playing Segal’s boss, plus Richard Widmark and Timothy Bottoms (The Last Picture Show) as the bomber. Sadly, Rollercoaster was a bit of a flop for a pretty understandable reason – it opened in theaters two weeks after Star Wars. Suddenly, a movie about people on a Rollercoaster seemed a lot less exciting than the adventures happening in a galaxy far, far away.
The new 4K release is a good one, as it contains the original Sensurround audio track. Sensurround was an early sound system that included aggressive subwoofer effects and, in certain theatres, would make chairs shake, with it famously used in Earthquake. In Rollercoaster, it’s used to replicate the rollercoaster ride vibe and is also used for the bombing scenes.
Here are the specs:
DISC ONE – 4K BLU-RAY:
DISC TWO – BLU-RAY:
DISC THREE – BLU-RAY:
Rollercoaster comes out via our friends at Kino Lorber on September 29th!