Killer Fish (1979)

Antonio Margheriti’s 1979 opus Killer Fish has a 4.2 rating on IMDb and is contemptuously dismissed by people who take movies seriously so I figured I’d almost certainly love this movie. And I was right.

And it has a cast guaranteed to bring joy to the hearts of fans of 70s cult movies and TV.

It should be pointed out that the title is just a little bit misleading. There are piranhas, lots of them, and they do the stuff you expect piranhas to do, but they’re not the main focus. This is not a Jaws rip-off. It bears not the slightest resemblance to Jaws (or to the movie Piranha). This is a totally different type of movie. This is a frenetic action movie and it’s a heist movie.

We start with a fine heist sequence. Margheriti loved miniatures effects and he knew how to make them work. He was a guy who was just not going to include miniatures work unless it was done right. Yes, you can tell that he’s using miniatures, just as you can tell when directors of a later era use CGI. But somehow good miniatures work just looks better than CGI. It doesn’t have that cartoonish CGI look. This particular sequence involves lots of explosions. Margheriti liked to blow stuff up. I personally think that this is a very positive thing.

At first we don’t know it’s a heist. We get a brief scene of a smoother operator doing some big-time gambling at a casino, then we cut to a man and a woman breaking into some kind of industrial plant (possibly a power plant) deep in the Amazon rainforest. These people could be secret agents or thieves.

We soon find out that they’re thieves. The objective is not sabotage (they blow up a whole pile of stuff merely as a diversion). Their objective is the safe in the main office. It would appear that either the owners of the plant have been doing some shady financial stuff or possibly they just don’t trust the government but they keep their financial reserves in that safe. In the form of precious stones. Emeralds.

The smooth operator is Paul Diller (James Franciscus) and he’s the mastermind. He has a hobby. Tropical fish. Carnivorous tropical fish. He has a tank full of piranhas. At first it just seems like an odd hobby. The duo who made the break-in are Paul’s girlfriend Kate (Karen Black) and Lasky (Lee Majors). We get the feeling that there could be a bit of a romantic triangle here. This suggests the possibility of a double-cross. In fact there will be lots of double-crosses. The first attempt is made by the two guys who are the gang’s hired muscle. The emeralds are hidden in a lake. These two guys think that grabbing the emeralds for themselves will be easy. Big mistake.

The heist story intersects with a separate plot strand involving a fashion photo shoot in the rainforest. The organiser is the glamorous Ann Hoyt (Marisa Berenson). The star model is Gabrielle (Margaux Hemingway). The thieves are lying low in a luxury hotel and they get to meet the fashion photo people and it’s instantly obvious that Gabrielle and Lasky are hot for each other. That will lead to big trouble.

The plot then gets complicated when the hurricane strikes. And what about those piranhas? Don’t worry, they get plenty to do (and plenty to eat).

So this is a hurricane disaster movie, a killer fish movie and a heist movie. Bringing that all together might seem like a challenge but Margheriti pulls it off with style.

The action scenes are excellent. I’ve already mentioned the excellent miniatures work. We do see the piranhas but mostly we see the results of their activities. And we get scenes of spectacular destruction during the hurricane.

James Franciscus is very good - smooth but with a hint of obsessiveness bordering on madness. Franciscus handles this with admirable subtlety.

Lee Majors isn’t called on to do any fancy acting. All he has to do is project a brooding intensity and a sense of being a dangerous bad boy. He does this effortlessly.

And then there are the women. Three very glamorous women played by three glamorous actresses. Marisa Berenson’s job is to be classy and stylish, which she handles with no problems. Karen Black as Kate shares top billing with Lee Majors and she’s in terrific form. Kate is sexy and dangerous, possibly treacherous and she’s a passionate woman. She’s a bad girl but we like her a lot. She has spirit.

Margaux Hemingway was not a great actress but she’s playing a fashion model and Miss Hemingway was a fashion model. Gabrielle is beautiful, blonde and dumb but maybe not so dumb. A girl doesn’t survive long in the cut-throat world of the super-model without learning a few survival skills. Maybe Gabrielle shouldn’t be under-estimated. This was a role that was just within Margaux Hemingway’s limited acting range but she’s adequate and she looks super-glamorous.

There’s no nudity or sex (although Margaux Hemingway does share a shower with Lee Majors). Considering the presence of thousands of piranhas the gore is very very restrained. The intention was obviously to avoid a US R rating at all costs.

The pacing is excellent (Margheriti always knew how to pace a movie). The plot has the necessary nasty little twists. You get a fine heist story plus a large-scale disaster plus piranhas. This is what cinema is all about! Killer Fish is hugely entertaining. Highly recommended.

I have the Spanish Blu-Ray and it looks great. It includes the English-Language version with removable Spanish subtitles.

Earthquake (1974)

What kept Hollywood afloat in the early 70s was not the movies of the New American Cinema that critics doted on. It was the disaster movie that got people into movie theatres. Earthquake is one of the classics of the genre.

You cannot judge a 70s disaster movie as if it’s Citizen Kane or an Ingmar Bergman film. The disaster movie genre had its own conventions. Whether it’s a good disaster movie or a bad one depends on how well it conforms to those conventions.

A disaster movie has to have a big cast, with as many real stars as the studio could afford. Stars who were just a little past their use-by date but who were still familiar to audiences were always useful in filling out the cast.

The first 40 minutes or so of Earthquake focuses on introducing those characters. They don’t have to be complex or subtle characters but we have to get to know them well enough to care about their fates. The Poseidon Adventure in 1972 had established another convention of the genre - not all the stars will survive the movie (and not all the stars survive Earthquake). Which makes it even more important that we care about them. 70s disaster movies differed from earlier similar movies (such as the aviation disaster movies in which tragedy was usually averted at the last moment) in that the disaster is going to happen no matter how hard the characters try to avert it, and 70s disaster movies faced the fact that when disaster strikes then real people, people whom we like, get killed.

The biggest star in this movie is Charlton Heston and his character, engineer Stewart Graff, has at least some complexity. He is married to Remy (Ava Gardner) and the marriage has not been a success. Remy’s dad Sam Royce (Lorne Greene) owns the company for which Stewart works. Stewart has been drifting into an affair with pretty young widow and aspiring actress Denise Marshall (Geneviève Bujold).

The other major character is cop Lou Slade (George Kennedy), a decent man but hot-headed and now under suspension for slugging another cop.

There’s also daredevil motorcycle stunt rider Miles Quade (Richard Roundtree), his manager and his manager’s sister Rosa (Victoria Principal). Rosa is supposed to be Quade’s pretty female assistant but she’s being rebellious. There’s a crazy gung-ho National Guardsmen, a dedicated doctor played by Lloyd Nolan, assorted scientists at the Seismological Institute and a bunch of dam inspectors worried that a dam could collapse.

While we’re getting to know these people we get a slow build-up of suspense as scientists start to worry that a major quake might be impending. This is also one of the conventions of the genre - the disaster starts to loom in the background.

The quake itself is a triumph of 1970s special effects. Thankfully this was long before the dark days of CGI so it’s all done with miniatures, matte paintings and other traditional techniques, all of which look better than CGI. It’s a movie that aims to wow us with spectacle and it succeeds.

The second half of the movie focuses on the desperate rescue efforts.

This is a rather merciless movie. Just as it seems that the danger is over the aftershock hits and it’s just as devastating. So just as we’re feeling relieved that our favourite characters survived the main quake we have to start worrying about them all over again.

This is a movie that is not interested in assigning blame for the disaster but there’s quite a bit of 70s cynicism. Some people turn out to be heroes and some turn out to be cowards. Even the brave rescue crews are not always brave.

The one group of people who really come out of this movie badly are the military. The National Guard guys do nothing apart from hampering the rescue efforts and shooting people without any real justification. Some of them turn out to be dangerous murderous killers in uniform. The military was not popular in 1974.

Mark Robson does a pretty solid job as director. Its a two-hour movie but it’s paced well and he builds some real tension during the rescue sequences with some clever race-against-time elements.

The acting is appropriate for this type of movie. The cast members understood what was expected of them. There’s plenty of enjoyable overacting.

Earthquake is pure entertainment and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. And that’s what audiences wanted - it was a huge hit.

Earthquake is easy to find on home video and it’s had a Blu-Ray release. My copy comes from Universal’s Ultimate Disaster Pack DVD set which also includes The Hindenburg (which I watched a week ago), Airport (a movie I have always loved) and Rollercoaster (which I’ve never seen and which I’m looking forward to). The DVD transfer is 16:9 enhanced and looks fine. It’s a great budget DVD set.

I loved Earthquake when I first saw it aeons ago and I still love it. It has everything you want in a disaster movie. Highly recommended.

Piranha (1978)

Piranha is the notorious 1978 Jaws rip-off from Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. It was a major hit for Corman. Joe Dante directed.

Skip-tracer Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies) is trying to find a young couple who have disappeared into the backwoods. Misanthropic hermit Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman) reluctantly offers to help her after her jeep breaks down.

She finds them, or at least she finds a skeleton that might belong to one of them. The young couple broke into a deserted research facility and found an inviting swimming pool so they decided to take a dip. Unfortunately the pool was full of piranhas.

These are not just your regular piranhas. These are mutant super-piranhas. They’d been bred in that research facility. The facility belonged to the US military and the piranhas were intended as a biological weapon for use during the Vietnam War. The war ended and the project was shut down, officially. Unofficially one scientist, Dr Hoak (Keven McCarthy), remained behind and continued his research. Now he’s bred super-piranhas that can live in fresh or salt water.

Of course if the piranhas get into the nearby river they’ll be able to reach the sea and they will become a global threat. But that can’t happen unless someone drains the pool, thereby releasing the piranhas into that river.

And that’s exactly what Maggie inadvertently does.

Maggie, Paul Grogan and a very reluctant Dr Hoak now have to try to undo the disaster. The first problem is the children’s summer camp on the river. The kids swim in that river. What would happen if the piranhas got loose among a hundred kids cavorting in the river doesn’t bear thinking about, but that summer camp is precisely where those piranhas are going to be heading. And Paul Grogan’s eight-year-old daughter is at that summer camp.

The second problem is that the next step on the piranhas itinerary will be the new resort which has been built by a consortium led by crooked businessman Buck Gardner (Dick Miller) and a crooked colonel. There will be carnage when the piranhas arrive.

And Dr Hoak has managed to smash up Maggie’s jeep. The only way for the trio to reach the summer camp in time is by raft. Rafting down a river infested with super-piranhas will be a challenge.

Maggie and Paul also face the problem that the military is determined to cover up the fiasco. And Dr Mengers (Barbara Steele), who has been sent to investigate, is determined to cover up the problem as well. She doesn’t see why the prospect of a few hundred people being eaten by piranhas should stand in the way of vital scientific research. The US military needs new and imaginative ways to kill people.

This was the late 70s and cynicism about the US Government and the US military was at its height.

Scientists don’t come off too well either. Dr Hoak is a nice enough guy but he can’t see any moral problem with his work. There’s always a price for progress.

This was an expensive movie by Roger Corman standards, which means it was a very cheap movie by anyone else’s standards. But Corman’s pictures always managed to overcome their budgetary limitations. Corman had a knack for employing people who could get good results with very little money.

The special effects were achieved fairly simply. The piranhas are just stick puppets. But they look fairly convincing. The scene where they attack the raft is particularly effective and genuinely frightening. The underwater scenes are done well.

There’s quite a bit of gore. The body count is high. Those piranhas are hungry. Of course you keep telling yourself that there’s no way this movie is going to show us little kids getting eaten by killer carnivore fish. I mean there’s just no way that’s going to happen. Maggie and Paul will get to the summer camp in time to prevent such horrors. They will, won’t they? You’ll keep telling yourself that until the piranhas start chomping up the kiddies. This is a movie that packs quite a punch.

The acting is OK. Bradford Dillman makes a good surly hero type who never wanted to be a goddamn hero. Heather Menzies is fine. Barbara Steele is delightfully evil. Dick Miller overacts entertainingly.

Piranha succeeds in doing what it set out to do. It’s a low-budget Jaws rip-off that offers effective thrills and horrors and it’s extremely entertaining. Corman got his money’s worth and if you bu\y the Blu-Ray you’ll get your money’s worth as well.

The Shout! Factory Blu-Ray offers a very nice transfer, there’s an audio commentary by the film’s director Joe Dante and producer Jon Davison and a number of other extras as well.

Piranha is good reasonably gory fun. Highly recommended.

Gray Lady Down (1978)

Gray Lady Down is a 1970s disaster movie starring Charlton Heston and that’s always a pretty good recipe for entertainment.

This time Heston is Captain Paul Blanchard, skipper of the nuclear submarine USS Neptune. The Neptune is returning to port at which time Blanchard will be handing over the command to his former Executive Officer, Commander Samuelson (Ronny Cox). The normal procedure is to remain submerged until reaching port but Blanchard decides it would be more fun to enter on the surface and enjoy some fresh air. Surfacing in heavy fog might not seem like the greatest of ideas, and in fact it proves to be a very bad idea. The Neptune manages to get itself rammed by a Norwegian freighter. The submarine promptly sinks.

The boat comes to rest on a ledge 1450 feet below the surface, well below its designed crush depth. Forty-one crew members survive the collision but their problems have only just begun. The reactor has shut down and one of the air purifiers is now inoperable. They have enough air for about 36 hours but the ledge is in an undersea canyon and it is subject to continual rockslides. 

This is all pretty bad, and now the Executive Officer (and soon to be skipper) is starting to crack up.

The Navy has no problem finding the stricken submarine. Rescuing the survivors should be no problem - they have their new high-tech deep sea rescue submersible, the DSRV-1. Unfortunately in order to carry out a successful rescue the Neptune’s escape hatch has to be clear and it isn’t. It’s covered by debris from the numerous rock slides. This is very bad news but there may still be a chance. An oddball genius US Navy officer, Captain Gates (David Carradine) has been working on an experimental underwater craft called the SNARK. The SNARK might be able to clear the escape hatch. 

Everything that could go wrong goes wrong. There are more rock slides. The remaining bulkheads on the Neptune are about to give way. The SNARK can’t find the Neptune at first. There are quarrels between Gates and the officer in charge of the rescue operation, Captain Bennett (Stacy Keach). The Neptune is running low on power and the survivors will soon be sitting in the dark. More crew members start to crack up. 

The tension doesn’t let up as one obstacle after another crops up to frustrate the rescue attempt.

You would normally expect Charlton Heston to handle the heroic stuff (since he was very good at that sort of thing) but oddly enough it’s David Carradine (who wasn’t so good at such things) who does most of the hero things. Charlton Heston still gives a pretty good performance as Blanchard, a captain who manages to combine a certain crustiness with a surprising amiability. David Carradine was of course a terrible actor and his performance is distractingly eccentric and at the same time rather dull. 

The special effects are reasonably good and the various submarine models look fairly impressive.

The producers got a lot of coöperation from the US Navy which is perhaps a bit surprising given that the film shows most of the crew members dealing remarkably badly with a crisis situation and given that the Neptune’s collision appears to have come about as a result of a combination of irresponsibility and carelessness (the submarine spotted the freighter on radar but the officer of the watch decided not to worry about it until it was too late). And the thought of a misfit like Commander Samuelson ever being considered for command of anything larger than a dinghy is positively terrifying. I guess the Navy figured that the chance to impress by showing off some high-tech toys would be enough to compensate for the depiction of the submarine crew as a bunch of neurotic incompetents. And the DSRV-1 is pretty cool and (according to the end credits such a vessel really was available for use by the US Navy for submarine rescues).

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that the movie is about the sinking of a nuclear submarine and we’re assured that there’s no danger whatsoever on that score. This was the late 70s and Hollywood was starting to get into full-blown hysteria mode over nuclear stuff (in fact Hollywood had been indulging in nuclear paranoia since the 50s). I suspect that in return for their assistance the US Navy vetoed any mention of nuclear dangers. I’m actually quite sure the Navy was correct on that score but I’m still surprised the producers were able to resist the temptation to introduce a nuclear panic into the mix.

The Region 4 DVD I watched was a rental copy and the menus didn’t work but rental DVDs usually are in poor condition. The anamorphic transfer was pretty nice.

1970s disaster movies can’t be judged by conventional movie standards. They’re supposed to be ludicrously melodramatic and cheesy and the acting is supposed to be exaggerated and hammy. What matters is whether they deliver entertainment and Gray Lady Down does that reasonably well. It doesn’t have the inspired craziness of other 70s Charlton Heston disaster flicks such as Airport 1975 but it has a few cool gadgets and it has submarines (if you like that sort of thing and I most definitely do like submarine movies). If you want a gripping realistic movie about a submarine rescue attempt in peacetime then the 1950 British production Morning Departure remains the gold standard. If you want action and slightly silly fun then Gray Lady Down isn’t too bad at all. Recommended.

The Day the Sky Exploded (1958)

The Day the Sky Exploded is an Italian-French co-production and is important as being one of the first European movies to attempt to jump on the science fiction bandwagon. It’s also an interesting anticipation of the “giant meteor about to destroy the Earth” sub-genre. To cult movie fans today its primary interest may lie in the fact that the cinematographer was a certain Mario Bava.

It’s clearly set a few years in the future. The first manned space mission to the Moon is about to get underway. It is a joint Soviet-US-British effort and the spacecraft is to be launched from Australia. The location of the launch site is not specifically mentioned in the movie (at least in the English-dubbed version) but the number of bad Australian accents to be heard gives the game away.

American John McLaren (Paul Hubschmid) is to pilot the spacecraft. Everything seems to be going well until he’s about to leave Earth orbit when one of the atomic motors malfunctions. McLaren is able to save himself by ejecting in the emergency capsule but he doesn’t have time to shut down the nuclear reactor. This will turn out to be an unfortunate oversight.

The now unmanned spaceship is heading for the asteroid belt where it explodes. The explosion causes hundreds of asteroids to cohere together into a single mass that is now on a collision course with the Earth!

The mission scientists in Australia now have to find a way to save the world but it seems hopeless. Oddly enough the obvious solution (obvious to any science fiction fan anyway) does not occur to any of them until the last moment.

The countdown to possible (or probable) disaster manages to build a reasonable degree of tension. The film focuses to a large degree on personal relationships, particularly between McLaren and his wife and between one of the scientists and the female head computer operator. There’s perhaps too much emphasis on the personal relationships angle - it slows things down just a little.

One of the more interesting elements is that while space exploration using “atomic rockets” was common enough in 50s science fiction this is one of the few examples that explores the consequences if something were to go wrong. While the movie takes the opportunity, which no movie of that era could resist, to lecture us about the evils of nuclear weapons there is one piece of supreme irony that may have been quite unintentional - the disaster is brought about by the peaceful use of nuclear power while the only hope for saving us may be those evil atomic weapons.

There’s a very heavy reliance on stock footage of missile launches and disaster scenes. They’re integrated well enough into the storyline but there is the perennial problem with stock footage that the differences in the quality of the film stocks can be distracting.

Paolo Heusch is credited as the director. While Mario Bava did not get a directing credit until Black Sunday in 1960 he had already been utilised several times as a kind of fix-up director, taking over and completing films (such as Caltiki the Undying Monster) that other directors had been unable to complete. As a result there are those who like to imagine they can see Bava’s directorial hand behind various late 50s movies on which he served as cinematographer. There’s really nothing in this film that would support such a theory in this case. There are a few scenes that do certainly reveal glimpses of the Bava touch as cinematographer - scenes in which the lighting is just a bit more imaginative than you expect in a low-budget movie.

There are also one or two special effects for which Bava would certainly have been responsible.

Of course it goes without saying that the one thing a good science fiction films needs is silly science. In that area The Day the Sky Exploded comes through with flying colours. There’s not a thing in this movie that makes any scientific sense.

The Day the Sky Exploded works reasonably well, within the limitations of low-budget 50s film-making. Despite the subject matter it’s less preachy than most sci-fi disaster movies. There’s a message here about international co-operation but amazingly enough the movie assumes the viewer is smart enough to work this out without being bludgeoned with it. There are no speeches!

Not a bad little movie. Worth a look.

Meteor (1979)

Meteor was one of the last of the 1970s disaster movies. In some ways it’s the most ambitious of all - the fate of the entire planet is at stake. Unfortunately it combines high ambitions with a limited budget and woefully inadequate special effects.

Dr Paul Bradley (Sean Connery) is a former NASA scientist who is urgently summoned to deal with a crisis. A very big crisis. A new comet had been spotted a week or so earlier. Nothing surprising in that, new comets appear regularly. This one was headed for the Asteroid Belt and as luck would have it the Americans had a manned space probe already on its way to Mars. NASA’s chief thought it would be a cool idea to divert the probe to get a good look at the comet. They ended up getting much too close a look as the comet ploughed into one of the larger asteroids, Orpheus. The asteroid broke up and now the fragments are headed towards Earth. One of these fragments is rather large - about five miles across - and it appears to be on a collision course with Earth.

Dr Bradley’s help is wanted because he was the man behind Project Hercules, a satellite armed with fourteen nuclear missiles designed for the specific purpose of dealing with just such an emergency. Unfortunately the decision was taken that rather than have the missiles aimed into outer space so they could intercept rogue asteroids they should instead be aimed at the Soviet Union. Now NASA needs someone who can realign the satellite to shoot down that pesky asteroid.

Dr Bradley reaches the worrying conclusion that fourteen nukes will not be enough to stop the asteroid. If only they had another nuclear-armed satellite! In fact there is another such satellite. The Soviets have one. The Soviets have never admitted that their Peter the Great satellite exists, but then the Americans have never admitted that Hercules exists either.

The obvious thing to do is to talk to the Russians. Since the Russians are also well aware of the approaching asteroid it isn’t too hard to get them to agree to send the astrophysicist responsible for the design of their satellite to the US to consult with Dr Bradley. Dr Dubov (Brian Keith) assures Dr Bradley that the Russians have no such satellite but speaking entirely hypothetically if they had built such a satellite it would have been armed with sixteen missiles and it would indeed have been placed in orbit exactly where the Americans believe it to be. And yes, purely hypothetically of course, it would then be possible to combine the striking power of Peter the Great and Hercules. And yes, he would be quite happy to give Dr Bradley the necessary information to realign this hypothetical satellite to aim its missiles at the asteroid.

Dr Dubov had been accompanied to the US by his trusted assistant and interpreter Tatiana (Natalie Wood). Tatiana is a widow (her cosmonaut husband had been killed a few years earlier) and Dr Bradley is separated from his wife. No viewer is going to be surprised when they take a bit of a shine to one another.

Dr Bradley and his team, along with Dr Dubov, head for the top-secret launch command centre of Project Hercules, cunningly concealed beneath New York. With the (hypothetical)  Russian satellite they now have thirty nukes, enough to deal with menacing asteroids. In theory. The trouble is that no-one has ever tried blowing up an asteroid before so no-one has any idea if the plan will actually work. meanwhile smaller fragments of Orpheus are already hitting the Earth, causing widespread devastation. If the missile plan doesn’t work it’s goodbye to civilisation.

As far as disaster movie plots go this one is no sillier than average and Meteor had the potential to be a disaster movie classic. This is however an American International Pictures  production, with the sort of parsimonious budget you expect from AIP. Had the movie been released a decade or two earlier nobody would have worried about the iffy special effects. They would have been regarded as par for the course for sci-fi movies and people would simply have enjoyed the movie as an exciting B-picture aimed at the drive-in market. By 1979 however audiences expected every sci-fi movie to look as good as Star Wars. And judged by the standards of Star Wars the special effects in Meteor just don’t cut it. They don’t cut it at all. In fact they’re basically 1950s standard. Of course for someone like me that’s no problem - it just adds to the fun. But it certainly was not going to help this picture at the box office.

The Project Hercules headquarters in a disused subway station beneath the Hudson River is quite a cool idea and looks good.

Meteor does benefit from an impressive cast. The characterisation is practically non-existent so what the producers needed were actors with charisma and energy who were not afraid to go over-the-top. Sean Connery, with charisma to burn, was an ideal choice as the hero. Karl Malden is very good as the NASA chief. Henry Fonda makes a brief appearance as the US President and he manages to look grave and presidential which is all that was required of him. Martin Landau goes gleefully berserk as a disgruntled general.  For some reason it was decided to make the Russian scientist, Dr Dubov, unable to speak English. This means that Brian Keith has to deliver all his dialogue in Russian. Dramatically this does work pretty well. In fact he pretty much steals the picture with a deliciously excessive performance - he even gets to sing! In Russian! Since she’s playing a Russian interpreter Natalie Wood gets to practice her Russian as well. And since she’s an astrophysicist as well as an interpreter her character actually serves some purpose.

Ronald Neame had directed The Poseidon Adventure a few years earlier so he must have seemed like an obvious choice to direct Meteor. In fact Meteor does have a few very Poseidon Adventure-like moments in its later stages. Given the pitifully inadequate special effects budget Neame does his best and he keeps things reasonably exciting.

This very much a movie from the age of detente, when (relatively) peaceful co-existence and even limited co-operation between the two super powers seemed to be entirely possible. There are no bad guys in this movie. Both the Americans and the Russians were equally at fault in building satellites with missiles aimed at each other, and both are equally willing to work together to save the world. Dr Dubov is not only the most interesting and entertaining character in the film he’s also a thoroughly charming fellow.

Sir Run Run Shaw was also involved in the production of this movie, which undoubtedly explains the scenes of Hong Kong menaced by a tidal wave.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray looks splendid although it’s disappointingly lacking in any extras at all.

No sane person would attempt to argue that Meteor is a great movie, or even a good movie. It is however quite entertaining if you’re prepared to accept ridiculously cheap special effects as a feature rather than a bug in a science fiction disaster movie.

Juggernaut (1974)

Juggernaut is a 1970s disaster movie set on an ocean liner. That might lead you to avoid this film on the assumption that it’s going to be a rehash of The Poseidon Adventure. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Juggernaut is not really a disaster movie - it’s an old-fashioned suspense thriller. And a very good one.

It’s not quite what you might expect from director Richard Lester either. Lester made his name with quirky, stylish (possibly over-stylish) 1960s movies such as A Hard Day’s Night. In the 70s he made a series of big-budget adventure movies that were also exceptionally quirky, managing to be determinedly anti-heroic and yet enormous fun - movies like The Three Musketeers (and Lester’s was the best-ever adaptation of Dumas’ adventure classic), Robin and Marian and the criminally underrated Royal Flash. Juggernaut is not at all typical of Lester’s output although it does have some distinctive Lester touches.

The plot is straightforward suspense thriller stuff. A madman calling himself Juggernaut has planted seven bombs on the ocean liner Britannic, bombs loaded with enough explosive to send the ship to the bottom of the sea. To make things worse the ship is caught in a Force 8 gale so there is no chance of launching the lifeboats.

A Navy bomb disposal team is despatched to try to defuse the bombs. They are dropped by parachute from a Hercules transport aircraft. The seas are so rough that it is by no means certain that any of the team will actually be able to get aboard the ship safely before being dashed to pieces by the sea. This scene, exceptionally well mounted, is a major highlight of the film.

The team is led by Lieutenant-Commander Anthony Fallon (Richard Harris). Defusing the bombs is no easy matter - whoever designed these bombs was a skilled and very devious artist in the art of bomb-making.

While Fallon and his team work to defuse the bombs Detective Superintendent John McLeod (Anthony Hopkins) of Scotland Yard is working equally feverishly to track down Juggernaut. It’s a race against time with the bombs set to explode in 22 hours. Of course the steamship line could pay the half million pound ransom but the British government has put pressure on the line not to do so on the (perfectly correct) grounds that caving in to terrorists simply encourages further terrorism.

What distinguishes this movie from a typical disaster movie is the rather subtle characterisation. All the characters are believable. Even the ship’s social director (played by Lester regular Roy Kinnear) is believable even though he’s there to provide comic relief.  He’s trying to do his job, to keep the passengers’ minds off impending disaster. He’s terrified himself but he still has a job to do. The ship’s captain, played by Omar Sharif, is obviously a man whose life is much less in control than it should be. This is all conveyed by subtle suggestion, a far cry from the cardboard cutouts you usually find in a disaster movie.

Richard Harris gets the sort of role that he always played to perfection. Fallon is a cynical, hard-drinking outrageously larger-than-life personality but he’s exactly the sort of man you’d expect to find defusing bombs for a living. He has spent his career thumbing his nose at death but he knows that death has a way of making a man pay for that sort of bravado. 

David Hemming is Fallon’s second-in-command, Chief Petty Officer Charlie Braddock (David Hemmings). Fallon and Braddock are poles apart in personality in temperament but they’re very close friends, Fallon’s over-the-top machismo complementing Braddock’s quiet rather self-effacing likeability. Harris and Hemmings have equally divergent acting styles but they work together superbly. These were the days when Anthony Hopkins had not yet discovered his inner ham and his performance as the flustered but determined detective is nicely judged. Ian Holm’s role as the director of the shipping line is one of the movie’s few weaknesses, being overly predictable and obvious. Freddie Jones is at his creepy best as Sidney Buckland, one of the many suspects interviewed by the police in their search for the bomber.

You expect cynicism in a 1970s movie, especially so with this sort of subject matter, but this movie resists the temptation to indulge in anything quite so obvious. There’s only one overtly cynical line of dialogue (delivered by Ian Holm on the subject of terrorism) and it’s the one moment in the film that falls completely flat. While Fallon might seem cynical he isn’t really - his cynicism is more a kind of bravado, his way of dealing with a life spent facing imminent death and also a useful way of diverting attention from the fact that he’s actually a brave man who is a thorough professional.

Maybe we’re supposed to see the British government’s attitude as cynical but the way the story develops tends to undercut that interpretation and to suggest that their tough approach was actually the correct one.

Richard Lester’s direction is crisp and efficient, without too many overt stylistic flourishes. The emphasis is on suspense rather than action and Lester proves himself to be equal to the challenge. Given the storyline you expect constant cutting back and forth between the events on the liner and the police investigation in London but it’s done in an unusual way. Instead of the rapid cutting that you’d see in a movie today this one cuts back and forth in large and rather leisurely chunks. Oddly enough this serves to heighten the suspense much more effectively.

Lester was brought on board quite late in the day after two other directors had departed. The fact that he didn’t originate the project and was essentially working simply as a director for hire is possibly one of the reasons the movie works so well. He had few opportunities for self-indulgence and stylistic excess.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray offers an adequate if less than stellar transfer without any extras apart from a trailer.

For some bizarre reason this movie was originally released on DVD under the atrocious title Terror on the Britannic.

Juggernaut is a taut tense and very superior thriller with enough distinctiveness of style to make it interesting without distracting from the essential suspense. Very highly recommended.

The Cassandra Crossing (1976)

The Cassandra Crossing is a somewhat surprising movie in more ways than one. It’s not the movie that the title and the posters would lead you to suppose and then having led you to believe that it’s a certain type of movie it switches gears dramatically and becomes a whole different movie.

It’s an action adventure movie that is also a classic 1970s disaster movie, and it’s also a classic 70s paranoia movie.

It starts with a well-executed action scene but you need have no fear that director George P. Cosmatos has shot his bolt early. He has a whole bag of other action scenes up his sleeve. 

Swedish peace activists have raided the headquarters of the International Health Organisation in Geneva. Presumably they were hoping for a few headlines but they ended up getting much more than they intended. Running about a medical facility with automatic weapons is not the greatest of ideas at the best of times (and is possibly not the best way to promote world peace) but it’s a seriously bad idea when the lab areas of that facility house very very dangerous stuff. Dangerous stuff like bacteria and viruses of some particularly nasty varieties, and even worse bacteria and viruses that no-one knows how to control. That’s why they were housed in an ultra-secure facility to begin with.

One of the peace activists is now lying desperately ill in an isolation bed while the other has decamped into the night. The one in the hospital bed seems to be suffering from some form of pneumonic plague, a nasty enough proposition in any circumstances but this strain may not be the regular pneumonic plague. Some of the stuff housed in the International Health Organisation’s facility is rather problematic, to say the least. Stuff like military viruses developed by the US that they were very anxious to destroy. The only problem is, they hadn’t figured out how to destroy them. So why were they housed in Geneva? For the very simple reason that it was supposed to be the safest place where they could only be stored in safety but where scientists could figure out how to get rid of them. 

Now things have obviously gone badly wrong. The US has sent in Colonel MacKenzie (Burt Lancaster), a man whose job it is to work out how to being uncontrollable situations like this back under control. He has the reputation of being very very good at his job, although he also has the reputation of being a man who will do whatever needs to be done, with the emphasis on whatever.

The Swedish peace activist who escaped is now on board the Geneva-Stockholm train. That’s about the only thing that is certainly known, other than the fact that he is almost certainly now the world’s deadliest plague carrier. On board a train with a thousand other passengers.

Among the passengers is Dr Jonathan Chamberlain (Richard Harris), a renowned neurosurgeon on his way to Strasbourg to collect an international prize. Dr Chamberlain’s presence on the train may be the first lucky break for the authorities. Although not necessarily such a lucky break for Dr Chamberlain who is travelling by train because he’s afraid to fly.

Also on board is his ex-wife twice over, Jennifer Rispoli (Sophia Loren). They’ve been married twice and divorced twice but that flame is still burning and they may yet be headed for marriage number three. If they live long enough.

Needless to say the authorities in every single country through which the train is scheduled to pass have categorically refused to allow the train to stop. That would seem to leave Colonel MacKenzie with no options, but there is in fact an option. Poland, despite being behind the Iron Curtain, has agreed to allow the train into Polish territory where it can can be unloaded and the passengers quarantined at a very secure facility. All the train has to do is cross the bridge at a place called the Cassandra Crossing and they’ll be just about home and hosed. In theory. At this point you might be thinking that the film’s title has some significance and that there’s something unusual about that bridge. Bingo.

For the first hour that’s how the movie progresses with the tension slowly being ratcheted up as one by one the passengers start to fall ill with disturbingly pneumonic plague-like symptoms. 

It’s at this point that the movie switches gears. Forget everything I’ve told you so far. That’s not what is going on. Or rather, it’s only a very small and misleading part of what is really going on. I’d only seen one George P. Cosmatos movie prior to this, Escape to Athena, which is an outrageous and delightfully silly WW2 action adventure romp. At first The Cassandra Crossing seems to be a very different type of movie, more of a taut but realistic suspense thriller. Don’t worry, Cosmatos has saved up lots of outrageousness and delightful silliness for the second half of the movie. This train still has a long way to go before it reaches the Cassandra Crossing. There’s time for plenty of mayhem. And mayhem is what we certainly get.

OK, it has to be admitted up front that this is a remarkably silly movie. But then in general silliness is a major asset in a disaster movie. It’s almost embarrassingly easy to poke fun at the gaping plot holes. For starters, the ultra-secure facility in Geneva housing bioweapons has less security than the average neighbourhood convenience store. A team of reasonably motivated pre-schoolers could knock over this facility. And then there’s the major Plot Revelation halfway through. I can’t tell you what it is, but it involves the nature of the infection and it’s a doozy. And these people think they’re scientists?

It’s also one of the most hysterically anti-American movies I’ve ever seen, although allowance has to be made for the fact that it was the 70s and even American movies in the 70s were hysterically anti-American. But this one really goes overboard. In fact the paranoia in general is hopelessly overdone. If you keep increasing the paranoia level eventually it all just seems silly and that’s what happens here. As the paranoia level rises the movie’s credibility sinks.

The cast is what you expect in a mid-70s British-Italian-German big budget co-production. Some biggish international stars (Sophia Loren and Richard Harris), some European stars (Ingrid Thulin and Alida Valli), and (being a disaster movie) it has to have at least one superannuated Hollywood great. In this case it’s Ava Gardner, doing her best but hampered by being teamed up with Martin Sheen in cinema’s all-time unlikeliest romantic coupling. There’s also O. J. Simpson as a priest. Of course we know he’s not really a priest, but what he actually is will give viewers a few giggles. Plus Method Acting guru Lee Strasberg, demonstrating once again that Method Acting is pretty much indistinguishable from old-fashioned hamminess.

Co-producer Sir Lew Grade probably understood television better than any man who’s ever lived. Unfortunately he didn’t understand movies at all and his involvement in this project is convincing proof that he should have stuck to television. 

So all in all The Cassandra Crossing is very silly indeed. It’s also undeniably fast-moving and it has plenty of action although the one mistake you don’t want to make is to think about anything you’re seeing. Once you do this the spell is broken and it’s just completely unbelievable. It lacks the delightful insanity of Airport 1975 or the even crazier Airport '77. Either way it’s kind of fun, in that manner peculiar to spectacularly bad 70s disaster movies.

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

The Poseidon Adventure represents the 1970s disaster movie at its most popular, and at its most typical. To a large extent it follows the template established by Airport but it develops the formula to its fullest extent. Airport made the audience wait a long while for the disaster plot to kick in, while The Poseidon Adventure wastes little time in getting to the main action.

The plot will be familiar to most people. The passenger liner S.S. Poseidon, on its final voyage, runs into a gigantic tidal wave and capsizes. The surviving passengers have to make their way up towards the bottom of the ship to have a chance of being rescued.

To add as much tension as possible director Ronald Neame has the water constantly rising with the survivors just barely managing to keep ahead of it. And of course they encounter a series of deadly obstacles on their way.

In keeping with the Airport formula The Poseidon Adventure spends its first 25 minutes introducing us to the passengers who will comprise the small group of survivors so that they have at least a little depth as characters.

Of course the movie’s main selling points was the spectacle and in that respect it is quite impressive. The capsizing scene is fairly brief but quite stunning and was accomplished by the use of a set that actually tilted. There was clearly some very serious money spent on this movie and in general it was well spent. The sight of passengers hanging from the floor which has now become the ceiling is an extraordinarily effective and terrifying image.

Neame paces the movie pretty effectively. It’s a fairly long movie but it never becomes dull.

As to his desire to make the survivors come across as real people, it has to be said that the movie has mixed success in this department. Some of the key characters, such as Manny Rosen (Jack Albertson) and his wife Belle (Shelley Winters), never really come alive despite the unquestioned acting ability of the players. Those two characters are also treated in an excessively sentimentalised manner which makes them less believable.

Gene Hackman as the Reverend Scott, who assumes the leadership of the survivors, is not entirely successful. On the audio commentary Neame make the point that Hackman felt that the movie was beneath him and unfortunately it shows in his performance. Both Hackman and Ernest Borgnine indulge in some serious scenery-chewing which at times is perhaps taken a little too far.

On the other hand the relationship between tough New York cop Rogo (Borgnine) and his ex-hooker wife Linda (Stella Stevens) is portrayed with surprising sensitivity and subtlety. They never stop quarreling but it’s obvious they’re deeply in love and devoted to one another. They’re both fiery characters and they probably thoroughly enjoy their arguments, and it’s noticeable that the quarrels never become spiteful. The audience is left in no doubt  that in spite of appearances they have a successful marriage. Borgnine and Stevens certainly have the right chemistry and Stevens gives a very fine performance.

Equally successful is the movie’s portrayal of the odd relationship between ageing bachelor Martin (Red Buttons) and young songstress Nonnie (Carol Lynley). They’re both lonely and vulnerable and although they have appear to have zero in common they do have one bond - Martin desperately needs somebody to care about, and Nonnie desperately needs someone to care about her. Their emotional bond is never made explicitly romantic, which was a wise choice. It’s more interesting not knowing if there might be a romantic element involved. Red Buttons gives his usual fine performance while Lynley is pretty good as well. Her performance was helped by the fact that she was apparently genuinely terrified by some of the stunts she had to do.

Pamela Sue Martin also impresses as Susan, a teenager who develops a fairly major crush on Reverend Scott. She was at this time a very inexperienced actress indeed but she handles her rôle with considerable subtlety. 

On his audio commentary director Ronald Neame points out that the movie was aimed very specifically at a young audience. It was a strategy that succeeded magnificently at the box office despite the vituperative reviews by many critics. 

As with all 70s disaster movies the enduing appeal of this movie has much to do with its considerable camp value, although it is genuinely exciting and visually impressive (and the upside down sets work very well). The premise might be ludicrously far-fetched but that’s no disadvantage for a disaster movie.

The Australian Blu-Ray release looks marvellous. The commentary track is the only extra.

The Poseidon Adventure is silly fun and if you like silly fun you’ll almost certainly like it. Recommended.

Airport (1970)

Airport was one of Universal’s biggest ever hits and it certainly played a role in setting off the disaster movie craze of the 70s. Airport though differs from the classic 1970s disaster movies (such as the sequels Airport 1975, Airport '77 and The Concorde...Airport '79) in several important respects which we’ll get to later.

The blockbuster movie (and it does have some claims to being the first bona fide blockbuster of the 70s) was based on Arthur Hailey’s blockbuster novel. The novel is pure melodrama (with definite soap opera tendencies) and it was just the sort of material that would appeal to producer Ross Hunter. The movie follows the same formula as the book, mixing melodrama with a thrilling story of terror in the skies.

Mel Bakersfeld (Burt Lancaster) is the general manager of Chicago’s Lincoln International Airport and he’s having a bad day. That’s nothing unusual. Bakersfeld has to keep the airport’s budget under control, keep the airlines happy, keep the passengers happy and he has to keep the politicians happy as well. That last bit is the biggest nightmare, especially with constant complaints about airport noise from nearby residents. The only chance of keeping the noise within vaguely acceptable limits is by having as many flights as possible take off from the airport’s main runway. And now Chicago has been hit by its worst snow storm for years and a Trans Global Airlines Boeing 707 has managed to get itself hopelessly bogged right slap bang in the middle of that vital main runway, thus closing the runway. That’s quite enough to wreck Mel Bakersfeld’s day but before the night is out the lives of over a hundred passengers will depend on Bakersfeld’s ability to do the impossible and get the blocked runway back into service.

On top of that there are the usual headaches associated with running an airport, including the activities of serial stowaway Ada Quonsett (Helen Hayes). Mrs Quonsett is a nice old lady but she knows every trick in the book when it comes to stowing away on airliners and she’s utterly shameless about it. Mrs Quonsett is really more a problem for Tanya Livingston (Jean Seberg) to deal with, Mrs Livingston being the local representative of Trans Global Airlines. But since Mrs Livingston is Mel Bakersfeld’s mistress he finds himself having to help her out with the ageing but indefatigable stowaway.

Mel Bakersfeld has problems with his personal life as well and they’re going to come to a head on the very night when he really does not need more things to worry about. He devotes so much time to his job that his marriage has started to crumble and his wife Cindy (Dana Wynter) is fed up.

Trans Global’s chief pilot Vernon Demerest (Dean Martin) has problems as well. He’s been having an affair with beautiful stewardess Gwen Meighen (Jacqueline Bisset) and now she’s pregnant. And Vernon has discovered something far more disturbing than that - he’s fallen in love with her.

Another man with problems is Trans Global’s chief engineer Joe Patroni (George Kennedy). He has to find a way to move that 707 blocking the main runway.

It was going to be a difficult night anyway but sad loser D. O. Guerrero (Van Heflin) is about to make it a potentially disastrous night. He’s decided that the only way he can provide for his family is to blow himself (and a hundred or so passengers) to bits on board Trans Global’s evening flight to Rome so that his family can collect his flight insurance.

The main difference between this and later disaster movies is that the melodrama is as important as the disaster subplot. This means that the film is quite lengthy and it takes a long time for that disaster subplot to kick in. This could have been a major flaw but fortunately the very strong cast means that the characters are well fleshed out and become a bit more than just disaster movie stereotypes.

If Burt Lancaster had a fault as an actor it was a tendency to be overly intense but he keep that tendency in check here. He knows that he has to make Bakersfeld a sympathetic character and he succeeds in doing so. Mel Bakersfeld is a difficult man whose devotion to his job has wrecked his marriage but he is aware of this flaw in his character, and he’d like to do something bout it. He just can’t figure out what he can do.

For the most part Dean Martin regarded his acting career as an amusing hobby and he loved nothing better than to ham it up as outrageously as possible (as he did in the delightful Matt Helm spy spoof movies such as The Wrecking Crew). That does not however mean that he couldn’t act. When serious acting was required he could turn in a remarkably effective performance, as he did so memorably in the brilliant Howard Hawks western Rio Bravo. Martin takes his role in Airport quite seriously and he makes Vernon Demerest an interestingly complex character. He can be quite an abrasive character and he has an ego as big as all outdoors. Underneath this not entirely attractive exterior he is however a man of genuine substance. He’s a dedicated professional and as the movie progresses he finds (somewhat to his own surprise) that he’s a man of substance when it comes to his emotional life. Whatever the cost he is determined not to let Gwen down. It’s a nicely judged performance by Martin.

The fateful Trans Global flight to Rome has not just one senior pilot but two. Demerest is doing a routine evaluation of Captain Anson Harris (Barry Nelson), a pilot with as much experience as Demerest. The relationship between the two men is played quite cleverly. The temptation either to make the two pilots buddies, or to make them antagonists, is resisted. The two men know each other reasonably well professionally but being polar opposites in temperament they have never become close friends nor are they ever likely to. Nonetheless they get on quite well and have no difficulty working together in a crisis.

Ada Quonsett is the sort of character who could have been extremely irritating but Helen Hayes avoids the twin temptations of making her merely ridiculous or sentimentalising her performance. She’s there to provide some comic relief and she does it very effectively. Jean Seberg is equally impressive and is able to make Tanya Livingston a three-dimensional character. Jacqueline Bisset proves to be perfectly competent as Gwen. Dana Wynter is also good as Bakersfeld’s shrewish wife.

This movie has producer Ross Hunter’s fingerprints all over it. Hunter liked big glossy glamorous movies with plenty of star power, very high production values and packed with entertainment. His philosophy was simple - people go to the movies for entertainment so that’s what you give them. Hunter had used the split-screen technique in his 1959 hit Pillow Talk and that technique is used also in Airport. And it’s used in exactly the same way - whenever two characters are talking by telephone (or radio or whatever) the split-screen is used. It’s used very extensively indeed in Airport but it works. If this movie has a theme it’s the importance of effective communication and this technique conveys that quite nicely.

Airport is in some ways an old-fashioned movies, even by the standards of 1970. All Ross Hunter’s movies are rather old-fashioned, but old-fashioned in a good way. It really is pure entertainment and it delivers the goods. It has melodrama but it’s done extremely well and when the disaster subplot kicks in it’s handled with consummate skill. The special effects are in general exceptionally good.

If old-fashioned entertainment appeals to you then there’s no reason not to love Airport. Highly recommended.