“One day, in a volatile fit of disgust, Karen Walker quits her assembly line job at a cat food factory to seek fame, fortune, and a suitable outlet for her pent-up rage. What more appropriate niche for this female equivalent to your prototypical ‘angry young man' than a women's roller derby team! Once inside the rink, Karen's physical appeal and truculent behavior catapult her to star status. Alas! a flagrant disregard for playing according to the rules coupled with a spirit relishing vengeance for its own sake cause Karen to fall from favor and transform her quicksilver success into a nightmare. Yet it is not at the hands of her blood-thirsty teammates that this viciously feisty anti-heroine meets her downfall.
“With Unholy Rollers, it was Corman Productions' desire to beat Kansas City Bomber to the screen and thus cash in on the roller derby market. While it was released after the Raquel Welch vehicle and failed to generate the same box office enthusiasm, Zimmerman's film still found appreciative followers, among them Paul Schrader, who quotes the director as saying: ‘What I really wanted to make was Gun Crazy on wheels.' Like many of his B-movie precursors, Zimmerman more than amply makes up for the deficiencies of script and production with exuberance and excess. The characters are more than off-beat or eccentric - they become the featured attractions one might expect to find in the surrealistic vision roller derby conjures up. Everything, including a garish color scheme in costume and decor premised on the exaltation of bad taste, hilariously poor renditions of Top 40 hits performed by an aberration of a '50s rock band, and any other stop that could be pulled, make Unholy Rollers a film that ‘...will be loved by the very people it exaggerates, and by those who realize that its exaggeration is based on love rather than contempt' (P. Schrader). For, after all, ‘(r)eality (was) an inspiration to be tampered with,' according to Zimmerman.” --L.A. Thielen