This was on TV several years ago. Unable to watch it at the time (probably because it was back in the days when they showed old films like this late on a Friday night on BBC1) I recorded it on VHS. A couple of years later, I transferred a couple of hundred films from VHS to DVD. This summer I ripped several dozen of these DVDs to mpeg4s, and finally this week I watched the thing on my ipod on a very long bus ride. It’s not an ideal journey for a movie to make, but it came through relatively unscathed, and despite the small screen still looked, and sounded, pretty good. Was VHS really as bad as we remember?
You’ve got to love Sir Michael Caine. I think it’s been passed as law in Parliament. If you’re British, Caine is the closest thing we have to a living legend. He had a fabulous career in the sixties, made some awful films just for the money during the seventies and eighties, and finally began the climb back to films worthy of his stature in the nineties. Now he is the Lord of all he surveys. Personally I am grateful for those duds on his CVs. Even in a bad film he shines, and seems to be enjoying himself. He brings a touch of (working) class to even the direst of efforts (Jaws 4 leaps unequiovocally to mind, which I understand he did because of the location’s close proximity to a decent golf course). Another favourite has to be The Swarm, with all those killer bees that in some shots look suspiciously like coffee granules being poured into a large fan. What that film had in common with this one was they were both produced by Irwin Allen.
Before the 1970s disaster movies, which along with those mentioned also included The Towering Inferno and the original Poseidon Adventure, Allen was responsible for some truly ground-breaking, high-concept television: Land of the Giants, The Time Tunnel and Lost in Space. The entertainment world would be very different now if it wasn’t for these shows, and Allen’s legacy. However, that’s not to say that everything he made was a work of genius. But, in my opinion at least, when he did make a bad movie it was so over the top and ludicrous that it passes into the “so bad it’s good” world of cinematic turkeys.
Beyond the Poseidon Adventure begins with some impressive model work of the ship itself turing over. We’ve seen this from the inside, and now we get to witness it from out on the ocean. Meanwhile Caine is in a small tug boat also dealing with the tremendous storm. For company he has Oscar-winning Karl Malden and Sally “Gidget” Field batoning down hatches and other nautical stuff. Caine finds the upside down ship the following morning, after the survivors from the first film have been picked up by the coastguard, and claims salvage rights. Almost instinctively he is able to find his way down to the Bursar’s office to rescue any treasure in the ship’s safe. Unfortunately for him, he also comes across Telly Savalas, who claims to be a doctor there to help any other survivors. They head into the ship, and basically reenact the first film, only going down instead of up. They do find some survivors, including Peter Boyle as a ex-army man determined to find his daughter. He’s always good for a laugh, though it’s hard not to just see everything he does as an extension of his character in Everybody Loves Raymond. Also along for the ride is good ole’ boy Slim Pickens, playing, you’ve guessed it, a Texan.
I don’t think I’m giving too much away to say that things don’t go very well. It ticks all the disaster movie cliche boxes, but is still fun and entertaining at the same time. Caine is in his “gruff on the outside, soft and cuddly on the inside” mode, and it doesn’t take long for the chemistry between him and Field to blossom into full-blown romance. The stakes are high. Can they get out before the ship sinks? You can probably guess. There are very few genuine suprises, but it’s still exciting to see exactly how it’s going to get to the inevitable happy ending. So watch this movie if you’ve seen 2012 recently, and you want to be reminded of what disaster movie cliches it used liberally. Most of them are here, but without the overblown portentousness of it all. Plus this has a much more reasonable running time!
For some reason, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure doesn’t seem so bad to me … not as pretentious as 2012.
Gavin Bollard
November 30th, 2009