Like any air disaster, Murder on Flight 502 begins in unassuming fashion, routinely assembling its diverse group of passengers, each with their own secret, but most importantly, each a familiar face due to they being aging movie legends, has-been TV stars or from being Robert Stack. Then without warning, it freaking explodes all over you, its 1970s debris of orange upholstery, hideous striped stewardess blouses and Sonny Bono raining down on you like bad movie mana from heaven! Continue reading “Murder on Flight 502 (1975)”
Category: Disaster
When Time Ran Out… (1980)
Along with Meteor and The Concorde… Airport ’79, When Time Ran Out… is often as listed as one of the reasons that time ran out on the star studded 70s disaster film.
While it unfortunately hewed to all the worst conventions of the genre (multiple one note characters each with a personal issue we care nothing about combined with large scale disaster that utilizes decidedly low scale special effects), it further tormented the audience with a villain who was moronically stubborn and a lengthy climax involving Burgess Meredith breaking out his ancient tight rope walking skills to ferry a child across a destroyed foot bridge. (That doesn’t count as a spoiler since it was randomly revealed early in the movie that William Holden’s Shelby Gilmore saw the high wire act years ago in Vienna thus alerting the audience that a sweaty-faced Meredith would surely be dramatically putting one foot in front of the other on a narrow beam near the end of the film while the rest of the cast worked on their tense and gasping reaction shots.) Continue reading “When Time Ran Out… (1980)”
Meteor (1979)
Despite being derided as being so terrible that it helped create its own mass extinction level event (the end of the 1970s disaster movie genre), if we’re being honest, Meteor is a painfully accurate depiction of what would happen if the Earth was about suffer a large asteroid impact.
Namely, that our heroes would push a few buttons, turn some dials, and watch countdown clocks and computer monitors until the giant rock either hit us or it didn’t while bustling around huffing and puffing to disguise the fact that they really had nothing to do but stand around with their thumb in their asses the whole time. Continue reading “Meteor (1979)”
The Day the Earth Moved (1974)
The Big One hits the viewer early on in the small scale earthquake drama The Day the Earth Moved, followed by an hour of aftershocks that easily measure a 9.0 of stupid on the Richter Scale.
From the beginning of the movie when Jackie Cooper’s pilot Steve Barker finds himself a virtual prisoner of a small town’s bizarre system of dealing with speeders to the revelation that somehow he knows an earthquake is about to hit that small town to him having to hijack his own airplane to airlift the disbelieving townspeople to safety, the only thing constructed in more slipshod fashion than the dilapidated town of Bates is the script. Continue reading “The Day the Earth Moved (1974)”
Heatwave! (1974)
Since this ABC Movie of the Week uses an exclamation mark in its title, it’s safe to assume that this is no ordinary heatwave. If it was your routine heatwave, people would simply be sweating, short tempered, whining about their air conditioning not working and moaning about water restrictions. In short, it would be summer. Assigning the heatwave the dreaded Category 5 of punctuation though takes things to next level sizzle! Continue reading “Heatwave! (1974)”
Runaway! (1973)
A train full of skiing revelers on the way down the mountain! But engineer Holly Gibson (Ben Johnson) has never seen it this cold before! But by tomorrow it won’t even matter because Holly is just one day from retirement! (The savvy traveler never takes public transportation piloted by a guy who is just trying to get through his last shift! It’s in all the guidebooks!) Continue reading “Runaway! (1973)”
International Airport (1985)
I’m sure Airport resonated with the fossils who saw it when it first came out way back in 1970. Back in those days, you could slap Burt Lancaster’s name on a movie poster and people would pay to see just about anything, even a movie where he just drove back and forth from his office to different parts of airport!
In those more innocent/clueless days gone by, you could watch a sweaty nervous guy just bring a primitive bomb onto a plane and think “shoot, that could probably happen about six or seven times a week at any old airport!” There were probably even folks back then who actually owed some of star Dean Martin’s record albums! Continue reading “International Airport (1985)”