March 30 movie: Rollerball. I like dystopian sf stories as well as anyone, and probably more than most (heck, I liked Omega Man), and I had heard of Rollerball as an excellent example of the genre. But actually it was a boring, plodding, "tell don't show" sports movie. On roller skates. It made Soylent Green look like classic entertainment. I'm not crazy about sports movies under the best of circumstances, but this was atrocious.
The only bright spots were 1. trying to determine what or who James Caan's mumbling Texas accent reminded me of (never did figure it out), 2. laughing at the "best friend" character, whose cheesy moustache made him look like the old Brawny man, 3. imagining John Houseman saying "They make money the old fashioned way: they earn it" every time he opened his mouth.
Interesting trivia note: According to Robert Osbourne (and by the way, what the hell was this movie doing on TCM? The C stands for "Classic," not "Crappy") the cautionary message about violence in sports was so completely lost on movie audiences that a group of investors actually approached director Norman Jewison about setting up a real Rollerball league. Yikes.
It's been a long time since I've seen it, and I'm sure it's as bad as you say. It was, however, probably the first sf movie grounded in the idea of corporate dystopia, so it deserves some props for that.