The 1970s gave us the widespread success of both disaster movies and terrorist pictures, with everything from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three to Airport to Black Sunday (the Frankenheimer film, not the Bava film) lighting up screens. Many of these films still rank as established classics today, but some of them have faded in recent years, former video store staples that just don’t get the spotlight much anymore.
This month, that changes for at least one of these movies with Kino Lorber‘s new 4K release of Rollercoaster, a 1977 disaster/terrorist thriller hybrid directed by James Goldstone. It’s got a stacked cast, a pleasantly meandering ’70s thriller pace, and most importantly, a real visual point of view that makes it perfect for this kind of upgrade. The disc is a little sparse in its offerings, but if you’ve never seen this film before, it’s also the perfect opportunity to get sucked into this fun little world of amusement park disasters.
George Segal, best known to modern audiences for his work on sitcoms like Just Shoot Me, stars in the film as Harry Calder, a safety investigator who gets the call someone in his job never wants to go: A rollercoaster he just recently inspected suffered a fatal accident, as cars slid off the track and plummeted to the concrete below. But it turns out this was no accident. A lone terrorist and extortionist (Timothy Bottoms) orchestrated the whole thing, and he’s about to lead Harry on a chase across America through park after park, attraction after attraction, as Harry tries to save lives while also working to catch his mysterious new foil.
Rollercoaster was shot by cinematographer David M. Walsh, whose career already had a versatile track record (he shot The Goodbye Girl the same year) by the time this movie came around, and his work is arguably the star of the whole show. This isn’t some gritty indie film shot from the hip in the Corman style.
This is a Universal Pictures production with solid talent behind the camera, and they make it look wonderfully slick, from the wide establishing shots of the theme parks to the granular detail of popcorn, gaming stalls, bright lights, and colorful rides. This is where this particular 4K disc really pops, reminding us that cinema in the 1970s had a lot of visual intrigue to offer even when playing by the most steadfast studio movie rules. I can’t say enough about how great it looks and sounds, as the carnival sounds mix in with the great Lalo Schifrin’s score.
With Segal and Bottoms trading blows from a distance, communicating through tense phone and radio calls, the film also finds a wonderful chemistry and rapport. Segal’s Harry doesn’t really want to be doing any of this. He’s a safety inspector, not a cop, and he’s in over his head the entire time, constantly pushing for his superiors (including Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda) to understand the gravity of the situation.
Meanwhile, Bottoms is cool as a cucumber, an excellent criminal mastermind whose detached commitment to destruction gives the film a real horror edge. He’s simply so matter-of-fact about the disasters he’s creating – disasters which really pop in 4K, by the way – that you can’t help but be chilled. It’s not a straight-up horror film, more of a combination of disaster and serial killer thriller with terrorist notes thrown in, but that doesn’t mean there are no scares.
Combine all of this with a package that includes two solid commentary tracks by film historians at various levels of closeness to the film, and you’ve got a lovely little refresher for a relatively overlooked disaster movie. Rollercoaster will never climb to classic levels of the kind that its brethren like The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure reached in the same era, but it is a fascinating little thriller with big setpieces to offset its character work.
If you’ve never seen it, you should treat it like an essential piece of the disaster cinema boom. That’s what this new 4K does, and physical media collectors are better for it.
Rollercoaster is now available in 4K from Kino Lorber Studio Classics.
