The Futuristic, Rollerblading-Themed Corey Haim Vehicle Prayer of the Rollerboys is Better Than Solarbabies But What Isn't?
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
A few years back W. Peter Iliff, the screenwriter of Point Break and Varsity Blues decided to do something about homelessness. More specifically, he took a bold stance against the homeless by arranging to have sixty boulders placed in an underpass popular with the homeless during one of the hottest weeks of the year.
That, to me, is some real super-villain type shit. Who does that? Who wants to make the lives of the homeless worse and subject people with nothing to the merciless heat of the California sun?
Iliff claimed that he was acting in the public interest to protect families and children from crime and drug use and mental illness but his efforts were nevertheless seen as fucking evil.
Homelessness figures prominently in 1990’s Prayer of the Rollerboys, the sociopathic writer’s first produced screenplay. The science fiction dud takes place in a near future where society has descended into chaos following The Great Crash.
Homelessness and drug abuse are rampant. Our country’s assets are being sold to the highest bidder. Harvard, for example, moves to Japan along with plenty of other top universities.
Gary Lee (Christopher Collet), a rumored descendent of Adolf Hitler, runs a White Supremacist rollerblading gang called Rollerboys that’s like the Proud Boys on wheels. These futuristic fascists are feared by cops and civilians alike despite being rollerbladers.
Corey Haim stars as Griffin, an orphan who delivers pizza to just barely make ends meet. Griffin was apparently friends with Gary Lee when they were in first grade. That made such an impression on the wild-eyed White Nationalist that he desperately wants his one-time compatriot to join the Rollerboys.
To fund their various endeavors the Rollerboys sell a highly addictive drug called Mist that they themselves are forbidden to use. They’re scumbags profiting off the addictions and compulsions of the poor and suffering but they’re looking to go big time and enter the world of legitimate business.
This is the element of the film that feels the most timely. Sadly, movies and books and television shows about White Nationalists convinced that the United States has been overrun with degenerates and drug addicts and that the key to making America great again lies in a return to law and order will always be relevant.
Because that is what’s happening now. And it’s what’s happened in the past. Additionally, it’s going to continue to happen in the future. In that respect, history is destiny and our destiny is to be doomed to forever repeat the sins of the past, like making a movie called Prayer of the Rollerboys when the disconcertingly similar Solarbabies is one of the biggest, most notorious flops of all time.
Griffin would rather hang out with his avuncular black friend Speedbagger (Julius Harris) but the Rollerboys are persistent and law enforcement wants our hero to go undercover as a Rollerboy in order to take down a house where Mist is being manufactured.
Prayer of the Rollerboys signals that Griffin has made the shift from smooth-skating pizza boy to Rollerboy by outfitting him with a pair of sunglasses that make him look like a real asshole.
As a Rollerboy Griffin lives the high life of decadent soirees filled with woman-on-woman oil wrestling and other debauched endeavors.
One afternoon Griffin and his fellow Rollerboys are having a grand old time taking turns pummeling a man with a burlap sack over his head to conceal his identity. The innocent fun ends when the brown bag is taken off the poor man’s head to reveal the nearly expired visage of poor Speedbagger.
Griffin is surprised and horrified to discover that the racist, kill-crazy hate gang he’s joined has some backwards idea where race is concerned. Griffin draws the line at being even a pretend racist but the Rollerboys inexplicably give him a plum gig at the Mist House manufacturing the drug.
We eventually learn that the “Night of the Rope” that figures prominently in Rollerboys’ mythology refers to an additive to Mist specifically designed to make users sterile. Patricia Arquette, a future Academy Award winner and one of the finest actresses of her generation has a perversely thankless role as the film’s ostensible lead, a party girl who throws herself sexually at Griffin and begs him for Mist but turns out to be a police officer working undercover to help bring down the Rollerboys.
It’s a role that calls for her to plead for drugs and have sex with Corey Haim and consequently does not make full use of the actress’ extraordinary gifts. Haim is cursed to live forever as a walking punchline/harrowing cautionary warning of the dangers of drug abuse but in Prayer of the Rollerboys Haim is clear-eyed, confident and seemingly sober. He was an extraordinarily handsome, effortlessly charismatic beauty that the camera adored and he was an excellent rollerblader, to the point where he did many of his own stunts.
In a way, that works against the film. A spectacularly bad, misguided lead performance would be flashier and more entertaining than a solid lead turn. The same is true of the film as a whole. I was tempted to finally watch and write about it because it seemed more or less like the exact same movie as Solarbabies. Also, Corey Haim. I am fascinated by that sad man and his mournful, melancholy life.
Prayer of the Rollerboys is a better film than Solarbabies but a less satisfying bad movie experience. It toys with interesting, provocative ideas, like having the Rollerboys give food and comic books to children as recruitment tools.
If you want to control and manipulate young, suggestible souls, sustenance and escapism are the way to go. Prayer of the Rollerboys’ obsession with racist American fascists intent on imposing their will on the American people, by force if necessary, renders it eternally resonant but it does not make it particularly interesting, unfortunately.
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