Rollercoaster

Rollercoaster (1977)

Somewhere in the crowd is a killer who can turn smiles into screams.

A young terrorist kills and injures patrons of a Norfolk amusement park by placing homemade explosives on the track of one of its roller coasters. After staging a similar incident in Pittsburgh, he sends a tape to a meeting of major amusement park executives in Chicago, demanding $1 million to make him stop.

Date of release
1977-06-10
TMDB
6.0 / 10 (163)
Runtime
1h 59m
Genres
Action, Thriller
Director
James Goldstone

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $8.2M
  • Budget: $9M
  • Earned 0.9× its budget

Rollercoaster is a 1977 American disaster-suspense film directed by James Goldstone and starring George Segal, Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda and Timothy Bottoms. It was one of the few films to be shown in Sensurround, which used extended-range bass frequencies to give a sense of vibration to the viewers during the coaster rides.

Production

This was the third film to be presented in Sensurround. Special low-frequency bass speakers were used during the roller coaster sequences. Sensurround was employed in only three other films released by Universal: Earthquake (1974), Midway (1976) and the theatrical version of Battlestar Galactica (1978).

"Sensurround is as big a star as there is in movies today," said Sidney Sheinberg, head of MCA, who attributed the better-than-expected success of Earthquake and Midway at the box office to the device.

The film was announced in July 1976. Director James Goldstone said the film was "not a disaster movie but a Hitchcock-like suspense cat and mouse story".

George Segal's casting was announced in August 1976. He called it "simply an action-adventure, something Alfred Hitchcock would do, structured beautifully, and combined with Universal's technology". Goldstone said Segal had "that humanity factor and it does come through. George plays the Everyman character who is repeatedly dumped on but who's never a buffoon...

Opposite was Timothy Bottoms. "It's the first time I've ever played the villain," said Bottoms. Helen Hunt, in her first feature film, has a supporting role as Tracy Calder, Harry's teenage daughter. Steve Guttenberg, in his first film role, has an uncredited bit part as a messenger at Magic Mountain who brings the plans for the Revolution to Calder and Hoyt. Craig Wasson, in his second film, appears as a hippie.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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