Sexploitation trash that feels like a watered-down
version of Russ Meyer’s pervy classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), The
Roommates tries to include a little bit of everything—generation-gap drama,
hard-punch-line jokes, soap-opera romance, twisted violence, and so on. None of it works. As such,
the only viewers likely to genuinely enjoy The
Roommates are those who savor gratuitous nudity, since nearly every starlet
featured in the cast gets naked at some point. And if there’s an actual plot
driving the movie, it’s nearly undetectable, because The Roommates unspools as a series of largely disconnected
vignettes, with the only throughline stemming from the housing arrangement that the
nubile leading characters have in common. Twentysomethings Beth (Roberta
Collins), Brea (Laurie Rose), Carla (Marki Bey), and Heather (Pat Woodell)
travel to scenic Lake Arrowhead, California, for a summer-vacation getaway.
Once there, the ladies get into mischief. One of them dates a younger boy whom
she meets while working as a camp counselor. Another experiences a humiliating
one-night-stand with an older guy. Most of them get stalked by a cross-dressing
wacko who eventually escalates his torment of Lake Arrowhead denizens from stabbing
people to opening fire on a crowd with a rifle. (The shooting scene, which
blends homicide with psychosexual elements, is the closest the movie gets to
being interesting.) Making the whole enterprise especially distasteful is the
way cowriter/director Arthur Marks opens and closes the movie with clunky
one-liners, to say nothing of the bumper-sticker politics that permeate the
brainless dialogue. If watching pretty young women deliver insipid lines while
nonsensical things happen around them is your bag, then The Roommates is for you. Otherwise, steer clear.
The
Roommates: LAME
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