Roller Town (dir. Andrew Bush) is the first feature film by Canadian sketch group ‘Picnicface’. They’re notorious across the interwebs for their comedy skits and memes - you might know them from ‘Powerthirst’. But Roller Town is even more wild than that. For one, the story is set in a roller skating obsessed town, where video game entrepreneurial gangsters threaten to take over their rink and ‘kill disco’.

Not only is Roller Town hideously funny and insane, the acting is also brilliant. The characters are for the most part exaggerated stock types that bounce off one another resulting in perfect comic timing. The protagonist Leo, is the token orphan of Roller Town, an underdog, with incidentally the most talent in the rink. His love interest Julia, is the mayor’s daughter, a poor little rich girl with a kind heart who’s dating the town’s biggest DoUcHeBaG.

There are many moments during Roller Town that feel as though they have been successfully improvised. This can only be achieved with a stellar script, something that the group Picnicface do very well. One of the delightful moments of banter in Roller Town is when the DoUcHeBaG boyfriend tells Leo to ‘make like a tree and leave’ to which Leo replies ‘I think I’ll make like a tree and stay grounded here for hundreds of years’. It’s that fine line between extreme stupidity and Einstein intelligence. Later on in the film, again the DoUcHeBaG says ‘why don’t you make a banana and split’ to which Leo gets in with ‘I think I’ll make like a banana and become an excellent source of potassium so that the doctor suggests that you eat me!’ Now, I’m a sucker for any degree of referential humour, so this was golden screenwriting while it lasted for me, as well as a great call that I will attempt to use in real out-of-the-movies life.

Overall Roller Town was extremely entertaining. The whole crowd at the festival cheered a bit longer than normal at it’s end. When I got the bus home after and was reading the program, I was bombarded by a raving fanatic who told me Roller Town was the best thing he’d ever seen and I had to see it. I told him I just had and we became instant bus best-friends, Roller Town will do that to ya.

Review Score: 9.0 out of 10