After a bomb threat is found scrawled on a mirror aboard a flight, Skyjacked briefly turns into an unenthusiastic game of Hollywood Squares meets Clue. Which one of the various 1970s personalities (it seems disingenuous to refer to such familiar faces as Nicholas Hammond, Leslie Uggams and Rosey Grier as superstars) could it have been? Continue reading “Skyjacked (1972)”
Category: Drama
Murder on Flight 502 (1975)
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)”
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)”
Deadly Weapon (1989)
When Zeke finds a crate marked “office supplies” floating in the local river, takes it back to his dump of a house and opens it to find an advanced, highly destructive anti-matter ray gun, the audience’s excitement builds in anticipation of the entire hick town of King Bee, Arizona being zapped into the Negative Zone, along with the abusive family, bullying kids, and cruel school officials who make his life hell.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the rampage as Zeke spends much of the film holed up in a cafe, holding the mayor, sheriff, and town pastor hostage. And then anonymous Saturday Night Live alum Gary Kroeger shows up as a smarmy TV personality to interview the troubled Zeke. Didn’t director Michael Miner know that whenever Kroeger came on SNL, that meant it was time for a bathroom break? Continue reading “Deadly Weapon (1989)”
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)”
Massacre at Central High (1976)
A cautionary tale about the dangers of standing up to bullies, Massacre at Central High will likely trigger gasps of disbelief for a generation of snowflakes raised to believe that youthful tormentors serve no purpose and that teachers and administrators at their school are ever present to assist students and keep them safe. Continue reading “Massacre at Central High (1976)”