The forecast for Brownsville is disaster! With a chance for various faces familiar to 1970s audiences to drown as a combination of murky model work and stock footage unleash a watery hell on the sleepy town renowned for its fishing and hotshot helicopter pilots!
As they are introduced one by one, the tension rises like the water behind the wimpy earthen dam, as you try to guess who will be swept away, inevitably prompting pained reaction shots from the survivors! (Don’t be sad – they’ll turn up again with guest spots on The Love Boat or Fantasy Island!)
Paul Burke (Route 66‘s Martin Milner) is the only guy in town sounding the alarm after little Andy Cutler takes a header when a jet of water blasting out from a leak in the dam knocks him on his ass. Andy’s father, John, is also the mayor and his political platform is the usual for these types of movies – aggressive pooh-poohing of whatever looming doom is right around the corner. But as is always the case, he isn’t a doubting Thomas just for the sake of being a contrarian. He’s doing it for the community that he built and brought back from economic ruin all those years ago!
All of us can recite the speech that follows by heart: “Damn it Paul! If we open the spill gates in the dam, the lake will be flooded and the trout fishing won’t be worth two plugged nickels! That dam has leaked for the last fifty years and it’s fine! Why, if we have to cancel Fishfest, the town will be ruined! Is that really what you want?”
Predictably, the town council votes to let the town be destroyed. But if the report by some nerd with the state says the dam’s about to take a dump, they’ll reconsider. But the mayor says report isn’t done yet! Except that the mayor’s man at the dam, Sam, says it is!
Even worse for Paul is that he’s engaged to the mayor’s daughter! Double worse? He looked up to the mayor like a father figure after his parents died! Still, Paul seemed like a bully when he pushed the elderly mayor into a table when they were fighting over whether to turn on the town’s civil defense warning system! Come on Paul! Elder abuse is still elder abuse even if the crazy old coot is going to get over a thousand people killed with his myopic stubbornness!
Paul’s not saving Brownsville alone though! I Spy‘s Robert Culp is rocking a leather bomber jacket and aviator sunglasses as pilot Steve Brannegan and reluctantly agrees to postpone trying to lay the hot red headed nurse at the local hospital to fly all sorts of recon and rescue missions during the crisis.
Steve is like the Han Solo of Flood!. He acts like he doesn’t want to get involved, but deep down he’s got a heart of gold and even better tha Han Solo, he’s haunted by tragedy! When he doesn’t want to let Andy keep the red handkerchief he gave him to compress his head wound, it becomes obvious that it was the same hanky his kid brother was wearing when he was killed during a tragic hiking accident!
Though it isn’t mentioned in the film, I imagine Steve taking that magic hanky to Vietnam and killing the evil commandant of the POW camp after he took it from him. “So this hanky means something to you, Brannegan? Then I will take it and let my men use it to wipe their communist asses with it! Hahaha!” I think this was actually the plot of one of those Missing in Action movies.
Once the dam breaks (the spill gates can’t be opened anyway because both the power and the auxiliary power failed), Steve and Paul go into action, saving Sam’s wife who is about 11 months pregnant and blowing up the local bridge because all the debris is getting caught in it and preventing the floodwaters in town from going down. But damn it, part of that debris is little Andy Cutler! And Steve sees the magic hanky waving! But they were forced to use shorter than normal fuses because that’s all they had! How much soggy tension can we take?
As one of Irwin Allen’s TV movies, Flood! necessarily plays as a scaled down version of his big screen disaster epics from the reduced wattage star power (with Carol Linley, Whit Bisel, Barbara Hershey and Roddy McDowell!) to the low level catastrophe depicted (there was a flooded house and a bunch of water outside the hospital) and suffers mightily as a result. The shorter TV movie running time also means the usual convention of building the dramatic backstory of the characters is abbreviated resulting in Steve puking out his hiking death story to Paul during a helicopter trip for no reason and even more egregious, Roddy McDowell’s character, a rich fisherman , who is among the first we meet, apparently goes to the fishing lodge in the beginning of the film and then is never mentioned again!
The script though didn’t just lose a character or try to make us care about a couple who never even share a scene together (Sam and his pregnant wife only speak on the phone once), it also utterly fails to convince in its portrayal of the mayor’s actions. The mayor is also a geologist and he has seen the report by the state expert that presumably recognizes the danger of the dam breaking, but we are supposed to believe he will put his town and his family at risk because he doesn’t want fishing season ruined? Hell, they only had one fishing tourist during the whole movie, so what is there to ruin?
Next for Irwin Allen was another TV movie the next year called simply Fire! and much like the heroes in these movies I feel compelled to issue a dire warning about it. But like the rest of the cast of these movies, I know I won’t listen and will watch it anyway.
© 2021 MonsterHunter
Glad to know you are doing fine. And thanks for another very funny review. Really, someone should have made a mash-up parody of eighties disaster and action movies. The closet one I can think of is the mock movie trailer of “That’s Armageddon!” from Kentucky Fried Movie. Hot Shots! 1 and 2 were very funny, but essentially Top Gun/Rambo parodies.