“This is the wheelzone!”

Justin’s rating: I’m pretty sure this is the exact dream I had last night

Justin’s review: Boy does this one take some explaining. So there’s this Bhuddist martial artist named Scott Shaw who’s also a very prolific author and director. When Shaw decided he wanted to get into the movie making biz, he channeled his personal philosophy into the field to create something called “Zen Filmmaking.” This basically means, “film whatever you want whenever you want without a script.”

Or, as the kids call it, “improv.”

In 1991, he made The Roller Blade Seven with this improvy-zen-whatever approach, which was then followed by Return of the Roller Blade Seven. Then, why not, Shaw took both movies and stitched their nonsensical insanity together to make, you guessed it, Legend of the Roller Blade Seven. Since there’s no way that I’m going to watch all this three times, I elected to go with the stitched-together version to get a taste of this man’s mind and then jet the heck out of there.

There’s a reason that you don’t just wing a post-apocalyptic saga, unless you want the internet to mock you over three decades later. Those sorts of stories are already complicated with their own world-building and factions and terminology that has to be carefully conveyed to the audience.

So imagine if that was all thrown to the wind and you had characters flung at you with no context but a whole lot of samurai swords, roller blades, and lingo like “wheelzone” and “passive.” Where scenes never felt connected to each other, where characters are not introduced, and where the soundtrack seems operated by a novice DJs plundering a borrowed assortment of CDs.

As far as I can interpret this gibberish, Hawk Goodman (Shaw himself) is some sort of motorcycle-riding sword-wielding freelancer who is sent on a mission to rescue some wayward nun from Frank Stallone (yes, he of the best music ever created by western civilization), Joe Estevez (Rollergator, another Shaw creation), and other assorted baddies who love to traverse the wasteland on rollerblades.

Hawk does team up with a whiffle bat-swinging clown and a leather-bound psychic, just to fill out the toy line. When Hawk and others get into fights, which does happen from time to time, nobody ever bleeds despite axes and swords and daggers being flung all over the place.

What makes the Roller Blade Seven movies so infamous is their style. It’s avant-garde without a handle for narrative, doing whatever seems cool at the moment without a worry for continuity. Actions are repeated continually from different angles — just in case you missed them the first two times, I guess — giving it a feel of being a music video. And not a very good one, mind you. Just one that thinks it’s being profound when its audience is rolling its eyes.

Also, I’m pretty sure that the cameraman either runs or skates with a camcorder for most of these scenes, often jiggling the lens through entire scenes to give it dynamic movement and me motion sickness.

You really do get the sense that this is all an art performance done in a way that makes it impervious to criticism. If you don’t get it and think that it’s confusing, then you’re not deep enough to understand its brilliance.

Make no mistake: Legend of the Roller Blade Seven is not brilliant. This is barely coherent. This is a vanity project where a bloated ego coasts from scene to scene striking a pose and yet doing nothing of consequence.

As with flicks like Birdemic, Troll 2, and The Room, the combination of a filmmaker’s incompetence and sheer ambition created a mess that’s as hard to watch as it is to turn away. Maybe this is the reason why society took roller blades away from us, because we couldn’t handle them responsibly.

Intermission!

• “No Rules Cinema” — just right
• “So much danger!”
• “Go forth and skate the path of righteousness.”
• Future Nuns have bulky and awkward outfits
• Is he wearing a full suit in a hot tub?
• I’m going to get motion sick from all the camera movement
• The nun catches the knife in her mouth and spins oh-so-slowly to kill a guy
• Is that… is that a roller skating metal bull?
• Are we going to have actor title cards throughout the entire movie?
• The mushroom-feeding scene
• There are lifeguards in the desert?
• Roller blading in that red leather getup had to give her a tremendous wedgie
• BANJO CONFRONTATION
• This guy in the middle of the desert gets an awful lot of visitors