Viva Knievel!

Quite some time ago, TCM ran a day of movies starring sports figures playing themselves. I've already done posts on Crazylegs (football player Elroy "Crazy Legs" Hirsch) and The Jackie Robinson Story. Next up is a delighfully bad movie from the 1970s: Viva Knievel!.

For anybody too young to remember, or if anybody from outside the US doesn't know (I'm not certain how far Knievel's fame extended), Evel Knievel was a motorcycle stuntman who was famous for doing all sorts of insane jumps, with things like jumping over a dozen cars being mild. The most audacious and famous was an attempt to jump over the Snake River canyon. Back in the 1970s, ABC's Wide World of Sports showed all sorts of niche "sports" including things like Knievel's jumps, which is how he became famous.

Unlike the two other films I mentioned above, Viva Knievel! is not a biography, but a fictional film with Knievel playing himself as the protagonist. The movie opens with some image enhancement, as Knievel goes to an orphanage to deliver gifts to inspire the little boys there, one of whom thinks he'll be able to walk again thanks to Knievel. Oh my, the tropes are going to be laid on thick here. Cut to the "real" world, where we're introduced to Evel's manager Ben Andrews (Red Buttons) and his mechanic Will Atkins (Gene Kelly, a couple of years before Xanadu). They're helping Evel prepare for his next stunt.

Will is the subject of several subplot tropes. One is that he used to be a stunt rider himself, until he turned to the bottle after the death of his wife. She died in childbirth, and he blames the kid for it. That kid, Tommy, is now "graduating" from elementary school, and Evel has arranged to spend the summer before junior high reuniting Tommy with Will.

And then there's a rival rider, Jessie (Marjoe Gortner). He's being supported by Stanley Millard (Leslie Nielsen), but that's really a front. In fact, Millard is a drug lord, and is hoping to lure Evel down to Mexico to do a jump so that Millard can sabotage the jump, kill Evel, and then steal Evel's custom-built semi to drive it back to the States. Well, not Evel's semi, but a nearly exact replica that will be used to smuggle drugs, since nobody is going to suspect the late Evel of smuggling drugs in his truck. Eventually, Evel and his crew do go down to Mexico to do the jump, but Evel eventually saves the day albeit with a lot of complications and stunts along the way. He even gets to redeem himself by performing the jump that was sabotaged the first time.

Viva Knievel! is frankly a terrible movie. But it's a fun terrible. The plot is frankly ridiculous; Evel can't act (although at least he's only playing himself); and the messaging is incredibly heavy-handed. One wonders how a cast with as many names in it got themselves roped into this. (One name I haven't mentioned yet is Lauren Hutton as a photographer.) Kelly, I suppose, was nearing the end of his career, while Nielsen hadn't yet had the second-act career revival that Airplane! was going to bring him a few years later.

So, definitely watch Viva Knievel! if you get the chance.

Gleaming the dystopian sphere

Another of the movies I found available for free on one or another of the streaming services that sounded like it would be fun for TCM's Underground if that programming block were still around is Solarbabies. So I watched it in order to be able to do a review here.

The movie is set in some distant future, when somehow or other that the opening narration didn't quite explain, the Earth's oceans have gone dry and all the water is somewhere, which is pretty damn amazing since the oceans covered 70% of the planet's surface. However, there's legend of a being from outer space named Bodhi who might be able to save mankind, or at least the portion of mankind that isn't making out like a bandit from the situation. After all, with a shortage of a critical substance like water, you know that there are going to be people who try to exploit that, and they're going to be the de facto government.

Meanwhile, this government, called the Eco-Protectorate, in addition to rationing out the water takes orphaned children and puts them in orphanages that make Oliver Twist look almost luxurious, also indoctrinating these children into becoming the next generation of enforcers for the Eco-Protectorate. As a form of stress release, the kids get to play a sport called "skateball" that looks half like lacrosse, and half like roller derby. The orphanage at the heart of the story has a team called the Solarbabies, and as the movie opens they've accepted a challenge from a team from another orphanage, to play an unsanctioned match at night with no rules in an abandoned arena.

The authorities get wind of this, and eventually show up to try to arrest the teens for doing something highly illegal. The youngest of the orphans, Daniel (Lukas Haas), who is effectively the Solarbabies' mascot, flees into a cave. There, he finds a glowing orb that seems to have the power of communication. In talking to the orb, he discovers that it claims to be Bodhi. And it certainly does have decided non-human powers, curing Daniel of his deafness such that he doesn't need to use the mechanical hearing device he normally wears.

Daniel brings Bodhi back to his living quarters, which he shares with the rest of the Solarbabies: nominal leader Jason (Jason Patric); Jason's eventual girlfriend Terra (Jami Gertz); sciencey Metron (James LeGros); Tug and Rabbit rounding out the team. They don't believe Daniel at first, but considering that he's had his deafness cured and then after they see some of the things Bodhi can do, they begin to believe.

However, word somehow gets out and other people want Bodhi either for their own power, or so that they can destroy Bodhi because they see it as a threat to their power. Eventually Bodhi gets stolen and taken to a research facility for what is nominally research, but is in fact an attempt to destroy Bodhi. The Solarbabies have to take off through the desert on their roller skates in search of Bodhi. The Eco-Protectorate's storm troopers, as you might guess, are in close pursuit. If they have this much power to remake the world, you have to wonder how a half-dozen meddling kids are able to thwart their plans.

Solarbabies is for the most part an absolute mess, and it's easy to see why, upon its release, critics panned it mercilessly. It's the sort of movie that should have become a bigger cult classic than it is. After all, so much of the film is laughable, with plot strands that don't make sense together and terrible dialogue. But at the same time, as I was watching it I couldn't help but think of the skateboarders in Gleaming the Cube and that I actually quite preferred Gleaming the Cube. I think the big reason why is that to me, there's something about Gleaming the Cube that has more charm, along with a motivation for the main character that is at least grounded in reality. Solarbabies feels as though it's trying to be too serious and too adventurous for its own good.

Not that Solarbabies is without its own charms. In fact, if you're in the right mood it's a lot of fun just because of how bad it is. But it could have been a so much better form of bad.

Roller Boogie

So one of the movies I watched off my DVR over the weekend was Roller Boogie. It's available from the TCM Shop on both DVD and Blu-ray, so I'm comfortable doing a full-length post on it even though I don't think it's on the TCM schedule any time soon.

The movie opens to the strains of Cher singing a disco-styled song, with a bungh of people getting ready to go out roller skating in Venice Beach, CA, in what looks like Busby Berkeley meets the 1970s. Well, not quite Busby Berkeley, but close. Bobby (Jim Bray) is the best skater around, to the point that he's training for the Olympics! Now, of course, roller skating was not an Olympic event then, and still isn't one, but whatever. Suspend your disbelief here.

Meanwhile, over in Beverly Hills, there's rich girl Terry (Linda Blair). She's misunderstood by her parents (Roger Perry and Beverly Garland). Although she's an excellent flautist and is on her way to getting a scholarship to Juilliard, she wants to roller skate, and takes her car, gets friend Lana (Kimberly Beck), and goes off to Venice Beach. Now, you know she's going to meet Bobby, because there's no point in having a movie otherwise if you don't have a hoary plot point like this. Not only that, but she's going to fall in love with him, which is of course going to be a problem since they're from completely different social classes and because Terry's parents think the hilariously square Franklin (Chris Nelson) is right for her.

Once Bobby and Terry meet, Bobby teaches Terry how to skate, and spends some time with her at the skater's hangout rink, owned by past champion Jammer Delaney (Sean McClory). Jammer's rink is going to host the big roller boogie competition, too, and Terry is set on entering with Bobby and winning. There's one catch. Property developer Thatcher (Mark Goddard) has been trying to buy up the land, and has reached the point that he's willing to use his hired goons to intimidate Jammer into selling. Complicating things is that Terry's father happens to be Thatcher's lawyer, although Terry doesn't realize this.

Now, you can guess exactly where the movie is going to go, that the roller boogie competition is going to be held after all, and that Bobby and Terry are going to win, all obstacles during the movie aside. And yet the movie is still worth watching. Why is that?

Roller Boogie, it turns out, is hilariously awful. The plot is insipidly unoriginal, and not helped one bit by a male lead who couldn't act. To be fair to the producers, however, the role called for somebody who could actually roller skate almost as well as Sonja Henie could ice skate. Henie wasn't the greatest actress, although she got plots suitable for her limited range. Bray isn't even that good an actor. The movie is hilarious in all the wrong places.

Roller Boogie also winds up being worth a watch because it's a paean to the late 1970s. The fashions will, by turns, fascinate, astonish, and horrify the viewer. The 70s short-shorts combined with knee-high tube socks are interesting. Everybody gets to wear skimpy stuff, whether it's the women in either bikini tops or skin-tight leotards, or the men wearing shirts open all the way down the chest (or even the one guy in the opening number roller skating in the sort of old-fashioned wrestling singlet that covers up very little -- watch for the old Adidas logos in various spots too). There's also the 1970s technology; watch for the telephones as well as the one black character's headphones and cassette player.

And then there are the musical numbers. I mentioned the opening one reminiscent of Busby Berkelery; there are a couple other crowd numbers too. More shocking is a solo number Bobby does when he learns Jammer is closing down the rink. What's up with that one.

Roller Boogie goes off the rails in oh so many ways, but it winds up being fun because of this.