Blade Squad (1998) AKA: Inline Cops - Full Movie & Review!

This just writes it's self.

     I've been on a tear with Rollerblading again, even bought a pair recently to skate at work around the brewery. I've mentioned how I skated in the past, even got myself in a couple of magazines in the 90's.. so discovering more inline cinema cheese is going to be right up my alley. Science fiction? Check. Bad effects? Check. D List celebs? Super check. This is 100% something I would have watched as a 15 year old with nothing to do on a Friday and a 12 pack of Surge.

My backpack's got jets

    This movie is either the leftovers from Prayer of the Rollerboys pitch meeting (which I covered here), or a poor re-write. I see a lot of inspiration from that movie, Robocop 2, and the movie Hackers.  All movies that are guilty pleasures of mine, and really know how to channel the 90's energy. This is an obvious TV movie to series launchpad for the network, and just never really worked out, was believable in anyway, and didn't have enough star power to keep it moving. This is a piece of TV was locked in time, at the end of  decade when the popularity of something started to fade away, but alas it was too late, and the money was spent and script was written.

Channeling Bladerunner?

     The movie opens up to the busy streets of New York city, the smog and pollution in the distance- highly populated, congested, and fraught with overwhelming amounts of TV PG petty crime. The only solution for this distressed city is to police it with a crack team of inline skating 20-somethings with jetpacks on. David Bowie's "I'm Afraid of Americans" plays over the crime montage, which in this version, has been removed due to copywrite issues. I love this song and it the whole Nine-inch Nails thing he was going through at time. I remember seeing Howard Stern's birthday party on the E-channel, and watching him perform live thinking how cool he was, and questioned what time period he belonged in. I know now, that time is obviously the mid-to-late 90's,. Duh.

High Tech.

     They are being monitored back at home base with cameras that are not attached to the suits they are wearing, and are just moving around randomly, and makes no sense. They were trying to go for an Aliens thing with how that worked, and really just missed the mask. We get a really good example of what the team can do, jumping over trash cans and on to the backs of small time crooks. Ironically the city does not look that overwhelmed with people/cars in these scenes and montages, so a motorcycle would be more appropriate in 90% of these situations. I'm sure I'm going to mention this a few times, but I'm having a hard time wondering why we need to have rollerblades on for most of the movie. Speaking of...

24:40 is when this goes down.

     You really have to suspend disbelief here. This huge chase culminates in an abandoned warehouse that has super long stretches of open area. After a quick unnecessary grind down some stairs, and a wrist activated pulse of the jet-pack, our Blade Squad was easily able to overtake a sport bike on full throttle, and stop it just in time from hitting a wall. This is pretty much the theme for the rest of the movie. Really outlandish jump takes, jet-pack pulsing, and very little of the severe congestion and highly populated streets to navigate, which was kind of the reason this team was put together in the first place. I like the off-camera executions from the villain who looks like 1 part bully from Christmas Story, two parts Budnick.

I can't believe it's over.

    Wow. Really strange how this did not make it into a TV series. (cough) I see what they were going for, I really do. However, the show set up the premise and the rules right at the beginning, and violated them. It was explained very early on why the team was deemed necessary from the jump, then broke the mold and made exceptions right away. Shannon Elizabeth was a good casting choice for obvious reasons, and the main cast was not.. horrible. If they went a more sci-fi route, doubled down on the tech part, it may have had a chance to be a 90's cheese cult classic. This whole last paragraph was me trying my best to write a serious review about Rollerblading Cops... I appreciate you hanging in there with me on this one.

 

I created a blog and got 500k views.

Look at all those views.. but who cares?

      I think this should be some kind of milestone that most blogs strive to accomplish. I've done some research on this subject, with people asking other successful bloggers.. "How do I get to X point and make money on my blog?" In my case, it cost me zero dollars, has me me very little money, and took over 10 years. It should be noted that in the last two years I've earned the lion's share of the unique views with my new posting schedule; who knew that when you post, people would read it!

Some Blog Stats

• #1 SFW post - Col. Sanders is the best twitch streamer at 7390 views
• Fastest to 4k views - Employment, beer and other things
• Hottest Topic - Movies
• Average post views - 4183
• Number of posts total - 417
• Dollars earned - $94
• Dollars spent - 0
• Number of posts about the movie Legend - 4
• Average views per month - 21834
• Number of redesigns - 1
• Number of times I said I like tits - 9

     I suppose we could ask ourselves.. who cares? I've found myself checking views here and there, but for the most part, I never look. I do get excited when I get a comment or email adding to the conversation. I have another blog that gets much higher engagement, so that fills the need for the interaction that I crave. The blog is just my outlet for whatever I'm reading about or what I'm interested about at that moment in time. Beers get consumed, I want to vent to someone and talk to a friend, and because I've moved so much, I don't really have any of those. The blog has helped me on more than one occasion feel better about my situation, and myself. A peak under the hood- I spend about 15 minutes per post, I don't research what I want to write about, and I just keep a few windows open so I can google things and copy links.. it's about as low effort as it can be without looking actually low effort. Writing blogs is kinda my thing and I've been doing it since the mid-90's before it even had a name. 

Thank you.

    Thank you to all the repeat visitors and new visitors who have supported me and read the blog over the years. Seriously, I fucking mean it. This is your blog and I made it for both of us. I wish I had some more interesting things to say that does not have anything to do with beer, work and robot tits, but hey, thems the brakes. My hobby is collecting books, so if you want to hear/read about me actually put time and money into posts, you can head down that way, to First Edition Fantasy. I don't post frequently, but when I do, there is typically a lot of time and effort, custom pictures and going out into the market to find books to talk about. Buying books, driving, and taking pictures as well as researching values and topics all take multiple hours. Anyways! Thanks again for listening to my rants, and keep coming back to see what will randomly pop into my head next.