(Belle Rosen); Pamela Sue Martin (Susan Shelby); Leslie Nielsen (Captain Harrison)(1972/20th Century-Fox) DVD / VHS
Rave Reviews
“The script is the only cataclysm in this water-logged Grand Hotel.”
—The New Yorker
“Works best as a Bad Movie to Laugh At!”
—Andrew Hicks, Internet Movie Critic-at-Large
“The disaster movie touchstone, a laughathon that… deliver[s] the ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ goods.”
—Edward Margulies and Stephen Rebello, Bad Movies We Love
Plot, What Plot? Okay, okay! We know—everybody loves The Poseidon Adventure. But if you think about it, you love it for all the wrong reasons: hokey situations, hammy acting, and ham-fisted direction. A huge box-office behemoth, it is often mistakenly cited as the film that started the whole all-star disaster film cycle. But the title that Poseidon does deserve is Most Successful Trash Film of All Time.
For the three of you reading this book who don’t already know Poseidon’s plot, it involves a mammoth tidal wave capsizing an ocean liner at straight-up midnight on New Year’s Eve, and ten survivors’ efforts to find their way to daylight in what ads proclaimed, “Hell, upside down.”
Leading the plucky group of diehards slogging through hell and heading “up to the bottom” is Gene Hackman, giving what Movieline magazine called “a perfect impersonation of man-of-action blowhard Charlton Heston.” Hackman, who won his Best Actor Oscar for The French Connection while Poseidon was filming, plays an irreverent reverend who spends most of the movie yelling—at the situation, at his cohorts, and in one way-over-the-top scene, at God himself. Among Hackman’s motley group of walking, talking stickboard characters are fellow Oscar winners Red Buttons as the Lonely Old Man, Ernest Borgnine as the Gruff Cop Who Resents Being Ordered Around, Jack Albertson as the Loving Husband Who Loses His Wife, and, most memorably, Shelley Winters as the Unlikely Heroine Who Dies to Save the Others. Others along for this wild and wooly ride include Stella Stevens as the Prostitute with a Heart of Gold, Roddy McDowall as the Timid Survivor Who Finds Love, Carol Lynley as the Timid Survivor’s Love Interest, and Leslie Nielsen as the Ship’s Captain, giving a performance indistinguishable from his self-parodies in the Airplane! and Naked Gun movies.
The technical aspects of this film—its pacing, costumes, art direction, and special effects—are admittedly all top-notch. But they service a script that features about a cliché a minute. Just try keeping count of how many times characters say “We’re all gonna die!” And we dare you to come up with even one line of “character exposition” that you haven’t heard in at least a dozen other earlier movies.
Don’t get us wrong, though: We love Poseidon too. It’s just that we’re aware the whole time that this is an Irwin Allen production and, as such, should not be taken too seriously. So throw in the DVD, sit back, capsize a bowl of popcorn in your lap, and enjoy this most entertaining—and tacky—of all the all-star disaster movies. Using the upside-down/inside-out logic that pervades Poseidon, it truly is a great film.
Dippy Dialogue
Lookout to captain: “Off the port bow—I don’t know, I never saw anything like it. An enormous wall of water coming towards us!”
Captain Harrison (Leslie Nielsen): “Oh … my… God! Hard left!” (Klaxons sound.)
Chapter 10 (“Oh, My God!”): In which the enormous wall of water hits, and the Poseidon is capsized during a New Year’s Eve party.
NOTE: Best Stunt—29:39: A man in a tuxedo plummets into a huge skylight and gets electrocuted.