Times do change: I can see more virtue in the fascist meanie viewpoint than I could in 1960, and Frankie and Annette, for that matter, are probably putting more money into condos than juke boxes these days.

But the basic art form of the beach party movie apparently never dies. It was first born, indeed, in the days before beach parties and even before bikinis: This basic genre had its first golden era in the MGM classics where Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney would bat around dialog along the lines of. "I've got it!!! Let's rent the old barn and put on a show!!"

Nothing has changed much in all the years since. "Roller Boogie" involves a bunch of kids who hang around on the boardwalk at Venice, Calif., and whose lives are centered around roller skating. Lest you dismiss this as fantasy: I've been to the boardwalk at Venice, and it is, incredibly, very much as it's depicted here. There were never real teenagers like the beach party gang, but there are, God help us, real teenagers like the roller boogie gang, and there are some senses in which "Roller Boogie" is a documentary.

But, anyway, the kids hang around on the boardwalk, as I was saying, and roller skate up and down and listen to Top 40 stations on their transistor headphones. And then we meet a local rich girl (Linda Blair) who lives in one of those Bel Air mansions where the domestic staff runs things while Linda's mother sits around looking painfully bored, and her daddy makes large amounts of money and keeps his daughter in new convertibles.

So. Linda and her friend, a busty brunette who would have looked great in one of Annette's bikinis, hop in the convertible and bop down to the boardwalk and skate up and down, and hang out at the rink, and there are some puppy love romances and some stunt skating and then it turns out that the local fascist real estate meanies, in association with the mob, plan to . . . you guessed it, they're gonna tear down, the rink jut before the big disco roller derby.

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