There are dystopic B-movies about roller-skating teens that
are so bad they’re good (Solarbabies, represent!), and there are
dystopic B-movies about roller-skating teens that are just plain good. Defying
all reasonable expectations, 1990’s Prayer of the Rollerboys falls into
the latter category.
Prayer of the Rollerboys, which was directed by Rick
King, takes place in Los Angeles in the near future, following a epic market
crash that left the United States financially crippled and deeply in debt to
various foreign powers. The job market’s been gutted, homelessness is rampant, the top universities have
been transplanted overseas, brick by ivy-covered brick, and violent gangs rule the streets. Chief among the gangs are the Rollerboys, a
gaggle of fresh-scrubbed rollerblading teens with automatic weapons and
insidious white-supremacist leanings. Led by charismatic psychopath Gary Lee
(Christopher Collet), the Rollerboys are both influential and hyper-organized;
for crying out loud, they’ve got pension plans. Shrewdly capitalizing on
the uneasy zeitgeist of the time—fear of an unstable future, hatred of
outsiders—Gary Lee has positioned himself as the city’s savior. He’s a whiz at
manipulating public opinion (the Rollerboys distribute free lunches and
propaganda-heavy comic books to kids, all of it financed by their lucrative
drug-selling business); in a more affluent society, he’d be running a Fortune
500 company.
After his estranged childhood friend Griffin (Corey Haim)
rescues his right-hand man Bullwinkle (Morgan Weisser) from a fire, Gary Lee
proclaims himself in Griffin’s debt. He lavishes expensive gifts on him, then
sets about coercing him into joining the Rollerboys.
Yes, Prayer of the Rollerboys is a Corey Haim movie,
and yes, I stand by my opening statement that it’s good.
What’s more, Haim is one of the film’s strengths. Setting
aside his widely-lauded breakthrough performance in 1986’s Lucas, it’s
probably his best work. (Yes, yes, The Lost Boys is a beloved horror
classic, and rightly so, but it’s not Haim’s movie). In his book Pretty in
Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies, Jonathan Bernstein observes, “Corey
Haim’s name quickly became synonymous with vapidity. His subsequent [post-Lucas]
work consisted of a smirk and a prolonged bout of tonsorial experimentation …
Who knew that [Haim] would become so entranced with his own adorability that
he’d become physically painful to watch?” It’s an uncharitable assessment, but
anyone who suffered through License to Drive must admit there’s some
truth to it. Haim, though, gets through Prayer of the Rollerboys with
nary a smirk. His Griffin is smart, purposeful, and likeable.
(I first saw Prayer of the Rollerboys many years ago,
then revisited it last week after reading an essay in Slate that drew
disturbing parallels between the troubled-plagued lives of Haim, who died in
2010, and Justin Bieber. In a frenzy of nostalgia, I then read Coreyography,
a memoir by Haim’s best friend and frequent co-star, Corey Feldman. Infused
with a sense of unstoppable doom, Coreyography is bleak and affecting;
the chapters devoted to Haim’s tragic life and early death are downright
horrifying. Feldman and Haim—the Two Coreys, as they were once widely
known—have been easy pop-culture punching bags for the past couple of decades,
twin symbols of the worst qualities of teen idoldom: the narcissism, the
excesses, the self-delusions, the addictions, the arrests. Coreyography effectively
inoculates their reputations against future ridicule. It’s impossible to read
Feldman’s grim account of their lives in the public eye and still take any
pleasure in lampooning them. Those kids went through hell, and Haim didn’t make
it out alive.)
Haim and Collet have a complex, interesting dynamic in their
scenes together. (Fun fact: Haim made his big-screen debut playing Collet’s
brother in the 1984 drama Firstborn). There’s a bond between Griffin and
Gary Lee that they can’t ignore, even while they distrust each other: Gary Lee
is well aware that Griffin disapproves of everything the Rollerboys represent,
while Griffin is well aware that his former best friend, while outwardly
genial, is probably evil and crazy.
Recently orphaned, Griffin is the sole caretaker of his
odious kid brother Miltie (Devin Clark), who idolizes the glamorous and
powerful Rollerboys. To protect Miltie, Griffin agrees to work with the LAPD to
infiltrate the Rollerboys and take them down from within. He also embarks upon
a tepid romance with undercover cop Casey, played by a pre-True Romance
Patricia Arquette. Arquette, a fine actress under other circumstances, gives an
indifferent performance in an indifferent role; her scenes could be snipped
clean out of the movie, and the story wouldn’t suffer for it.
Gary Lee, who is no fool, is skeptical about Griffin’s
change of heart and begins testing his loyalties in violent and unpleasant
ways. Complicating matters more is Bullwinkle, who seethes in resentment at
owing his life to Griffin, and who openly bristles at the way Griffin has
supplanted him as Gary Lee’s clear favorite.
Ah, Bullwinkle, or, as I like to think of him, Pissy
McPouty. A prickly, snappish, gun-toting mess of snarled put-downs and sneers
and sarcastically rolled eyes hiding under a great mop of hair, Bullwinkle is fun.
After this, Morgan Weisser went on to star in the short-lived FOX series Space:
Above and Beyond (1995), a Very Serious sci-fi drama about beautiful young
people fighting aliens in space; it was gloomy and solemn and not especially
good—picture Battlestar Galactica, but where nothing ever happens—and
yet my sister and I watched every single damn episode, strictly because of our
fondness for Bullwinkle.
Also notable amongst the Rollerboys is the garrulous Bango
(Mark Pellegrino): friendlier than Bullwinkle, but no less dangerous.
Pellegrino has gone on to work steadily in television (he was Jacob on Lost,
and he currently stars in The Tomorrow People on The CW). It may be a
B-movie, but Haim, Collet, Weisser and Pellegrino all turn in big-league
performances.
And make no mistake, Prayer of the Rollerboys is
indeed a B-movie. That’s not meant as a slight. Probably because they’re forced
to make more out of less, dystopic B-movies have a pretty decent track
record—just look at the original Mad Max, or A Boy and His Dog—whereas
their big-budget cousins often drift into a warm soup of undifferentiated
glossy spectacle. (Last year, I sat in a movie theater and watched, one after
another, the trailers for After Earth, Elysium, and Oblivion,
and… those are all the same damn movie, right?) Prayer of the Rollerboys takes some of the scruffier parts
of Los Angeles—the ratty stretches of Venice Beach, the concrete culverts of
the L.A. River, the industrial sprawls of El Segundo and Long Beach—and makes
them look just a smidgen rougher and scarier. It’s an inexpensive solution, but
it works.
The script, which is by veteran screenwriter W. Peter Iliff
(Point Break, Varsity Blues, Patriot Games), is smart
enough to know the film isn’t about the setting, it’s about Griffin and Gary
Lee. Their story—childhood best friends, one morally pure and the other deeply
corrupt, who wind up scheming to destroy each other—would work equally well in
other settings. Turn Griffin and Gary Lee into feuding Wall Street titans, or
Hong Kong Triad members, or rival small-town librarians, and their story would
still pack a punch.
It all builds, amidst betrayals and mounting violence, to
a surprisingly rip-roaring climax, in which a gun-toting Gary Lee relentlessly
pursues Griffin (on rollerblades, natch) through an abandoned naval shipyard.
The tag ending, in which Gary Lee calmly orchestrates terrible vengeance
against Griffin from his prison cell, makes me genuinely sad nobody ever made a
sequel. I would be happy to spend more time with Griffin and Gary Lee.
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