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So, it's the late seventies and Michael Caine has moved to the US, looking to establish himself as a leading actor in Hollywood. His first port of call? The disaster movie. Paul Newman and Steve McQueen had just made The Towering Inferno which, along with The Poseidon Adventure, had been a huge commercial success under producer Irwin Allen. And after eyeing up a million dollar house in Beverly Hills for his family, Caine was eager that he join the new-found craze, this time with Allen acting as director of the picture.
This was the expanded 156 minute version. And yet for an overly long, notorious, over-budgeted, universally panned disaster movie responsible for wasting many talented actors and actresses (an aging Katharine Ross among them), it didn't drag. I can't quite believe it, but I actually enjoyed it. That isn't to say it's not a bad movie. Because it is. I can sum it up with one scene ; an ambulance is shown screeching through Houston, sirens blaring, clearly in peril. It then cuts to the inside of the ambulance where the driver is losing control and eventually crashes into a shop window. The sequence lasts about thirty seconds at most. Cut to next scene, a dialogue scene as it happens. No meaning. No worth, for we know the city is under attack from killer bees already as it's been happening throughout the previous two hours of film. Totally and utterly pointless. And that's what this film is. $12 million of frequently misused time, energy, talents and resources.
The dialogue is awful, the effects are deplorable (probably the worst nuclear explosion put on film), the acting is passable at best and yet something, something makes it very watchable and highly enjoyable. Maybe it's the unintentional laughs (random, OTT train crash down a cliff side), the genuine suspense when Henry Fonda (yep, even he was in this film) poisons himself with the bee venom so he can trial his antidote, the interaction between the lovestruck trio of Ben Johnson, Fred MacMurray and Olivia de Havilland or even the honest, moving scene in which Slim Pickens discovers the body of his son. There are moments of utter gold to be found, even for a movie in which intelligent (!), randy, African killer bees are the villains.
As for Caine, well it's one of his weakest performances (not that he has much to go with anyway) and he arrived back in England with only a quarter of a million pounds to go towards his dream home, thanks to tax. But he did go back and make Beyond The Poseidon Adventure, again with Allen, so he must have had a good time. This is far from his worst film. The Holcroft Covenant was so much worse. So much worse.
