27. The Roller Blade Seven
Year: 1991
Director: Donald G. Jackson
Remember when I called Hell Comes to Frogtown
one of the more coherent films by Donald G. Jackson? This is why. When
Jackson met martial artist/producer Scott Shaw, they elevated their work
to Henry Darger-tier outsider art. Employing a style coined as “Zen
Filmmaking,” they set out to make a post-apocalyptic,
rollerblade-centric action movie with absolutely no script involved. As
Shaw says, Zen Filmmaking “allows for a spiritually pure source of
immediate inspiration to be the only guide in the filmmaking process.”
Here, it guided them to a movie about a nomadic warrior who teams up
with a kabuki mime and a banjo player to defeat Joe Estevez and Frank
Stallone in a Road Warrior-like wasteland. The Roller Blade Seven
pretty easily manages to be the most psychedelic, mind-bending film on
this entire list—my attempts to describe here only hint at its profound
weirdness. It’s a movie that is indescribable until you experience it.
