The Poseidon Adventure

1972  ****

Seventies disaster movies! While I have long eschewed the lure of "predicament movies" like Open Water, 127 Hours, or Trapped on a Chairlift, I have recently become enamored of this particular cinematic flavor. This is 110% thanks to the 2017 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 that riffs the 1978 movie Avalanche! starring Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow. These days that episode is my Most Watched Thing that I will just have running in the background all the time, while I'm sorting Lego or whatever.

Whether I will watch Avalanche! by itself, minus the MST3K banter, is yet to be seen.  But my many, many viewings have made me familiar with some of the common ingredients of the genre.

First, you gotta have the Guy Who Everyone Should Have Listened To. This movie has more than one, actually, but the first one is the indomitable Captain Leslie Nielsen.

Not pictured: Me, yelling "and don't call me Shirley!"

Then you need the yang to that yin, Guy In Charge Who Doesn't Listen, aka "Mayor of Amity." This movie is actually pretty tight, so that dude gets exactly one speech about saving the company money by getting the Poseidon to the scrap yard on time.  Other than that he just shadows Captain Drebin around, scowling.

"Yes, he's right here next to me.  No, he's not going to listen."

I had actually never seen this movie before, although I'd seen certain iconic moments on shows like That's Hollywood lots and lots of times.  I was hoping for some Love Boat style exposition at the front end, and I was not disappointed.  The character beats are slapped on the actors like post-it notes, and before long our on-deck who's who is over and we're at my favorite disaster movie ingredient, The Party. 

Our Ballroom voted Worst Room to be Upside-Down In 5 years running!

The symbolism of The Party is so obviously front-loaded it hardly bears repeating (blind hubris of man, Nero fiddling while Rome burned, lemmings, whatever...), but there's something SO satisfying about watching a bunch of SEVENTIES people partying into disaster.  Our key players get to add some more toppings to their established archetypes while seated between stunning 70s model-looking ladies who have no lines.  Key among them is the second Guy Everyone Should Listen To, Gene Hackman as the charismatic and radical Reverend Scott.  We intercut from the New Year's Eve countdown watch the gang in the cockpit bring a knife to a tidal wave fight, and then moments after the New Year...

"Save us Gopher!"

Once the tub's flipped over the real adventure begins: snaking an escape route through an upside-down, sinking, burning and occasionally exploding ship.  Gene Hackman assembles a plucky gang made up of the people who have had lines so far in the movie, and another round of "No, listen to ME!" starts spooling out, because the know-nothing Purser says everyone should stay there until rescued. It's pretty much the reverse of that scene in The Mist when the Punisher's next door neighbor leads two dozen people to their doom because he doesn't believe the Punisher.  I wondered if we'd get payoff on how wrong the Purser was and there is no wait at all.  Just as the plucky gang make their way to a perch in the corner there's an explosion and the ballroom is suddenly Action Park deadly.  

But of course panicked people are wicked stupid and they knock the makeshift ladder down, leaving Hackman to ruefully close the door behind him.  The fact that they could rally and put the thing back up, or that the rising water would eventually enable their exit, occurs to nobody.  They stand around in their finery and weep and cry and it's so freaking Noah's Ark you almost expect a pair of llamas to be up there...

Here I must note another perennial dislike of mine, and that's when the gang of survivors argue with each other a la that annoying bald guy in Night of the Living Dead.  But I note this dislike to say it does not apply here: A loud, enthusiastic push-pull does indeed emerge between Hackman and Ernest Borgnine, full of "I've had just about enough" and "you know what I don't like about you!" and stuff like that... but it's GREAT.  I mean, this is scenery-chewing by design and scenery-chewing in execution, and these dynamics are just as in-your-face as the clunky exposition from before, but these actors include some major players at the top of their game and it's entertaining as hell.  It's entertaining enough that I'm giving this the full four stars when it's arguably might be more of a 3 1/2 star experience for some.

Although we're on the open sea, almost all of this flick is indoors.  The thrills are claustrophobic, hurried journeys through shafts and vents with the rising water creeping behind. And that brings us to our final ingredient, Random Death.

Who lives and who dies? The playing out of this phenomenon is actually better illustrated in some other flicks I plan to tackle, as The Poseidon Adventure winnows down its cast pretty hard with that Noah's Ark scene, and seeing who lives from a small imperiled group is pretty standard horror movie fare, right? Nevertheless there are surprises.

My plan is to only hit some of the major players in this genre, of which The Poseidon Adventure is the first and, arguably, the best. I've heard of at least one family who watches this movie every Thanksgiving; it's that kind of thing.  Highly recommended and an excellent start to my month.