BLACK SUNDAY (1977) - an epic terrorist thriller

BLACK SUNDAY
(1977, USA)

The Baader-Meinhof Complex meets The Hindenburg...

If you're expecting a disaster movie, which this was certainly sold as, you might be disappointed. Which I was when it was first released. Like Two Minute Warning, there's a very long wait for anything vaguely disastrous. Far too much emphasis was placed on the admittedly spectacular and expensive movie prop - the Goodyear blimp - which completely and literally overshadows a realistic counter-terrorism thriller. Based on a book, it was the story that grabbed the imagination - nowadays, we'd be just as interested in the author, Thomas Harris, now famous for The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon, Hannibal...


A big-budget terrorism blockbuster, it's an epic story almost two and a half hours long. Counter-terrorist agent Kabakov chases Black September terrorist Dahlia across the world, trying to make sense of the scraps of information she fails to cover up. We begin almost as much in the dark as Kabakov as to what they're planning. The film spends as much time with the terrorists as with the police.

There are many standout scenes, some punctuated with violence that's almost too strong now. I remember seeing it in the cinema and being shocked by bystanders getting hit in the complex street shootout. I prefer the earlier section of the story with Kabakov slowly discovering their plot. The desert test is one memorable highlight, as much for the sunlight as the surprise. There's quite a change in tone when the action switches to Miami and another gear change as the Super Bowl kicks in.


Marthe Keller is a key piece of casting in understanding what they were aiming for. At times Black Sunday approaches the same level of gritty suspense as the tremendous Marathon Man, in which she also starred. The story centred around Nazi war criminals, Black Sunday has terrorists. While the 1970s had seen plenty of plane hijackings, assassinations and bombings, none had happened on American soil. This made the film an entertaining fiction, the same way disaster movies were fun as long as they were unlikely. The story wasn't meant to be a warning, as much as a fanciful 'what if?' for the sake of a good thriller.

Today it's more terrifying, and benefits from the matter-of-fact look at how terrorists operate and recruit, as well as how far counter-terrorist forces will go to track them down. Robert Shaw lands the great role as Kabakov, who can't afford to be less than ruthless in trying to save lives. He plays an action hero that seems very real - no wisecracks after the kills. He'd also played a steely killer in From Russia With Love and a very different hunter in Jaws. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The Deep... Shaw had been in many great seventies films, so I was saddened and shocked when he passed away before the decade was out.


Marthe Keller is the other standout star as Dahlia, the terrorist sent to recruit a disaffected Vietnam veteran (Bruce Dern) whose job is the linchpin of their plot. While Keller reaches her emotional extremes, I was distracted when Dern occasionally fails to sell his moments of distraught mania.

This is classic John Frankenheimer, from the director of a long line of highly-regarded action movies and political thrillers. Seven Days In May, The Manchurian Candidate, The Train, Seconds, Grand Prix, The French Connection II, Ronin are all recommended variously for large-scale action, gritty drama and edgy stories. His use of locations and handheld camerawork in Black Sunday add realism to a story we now wish wasn't quite so accurate.

Much of the finale was shot during the actual 1976 Superbowl (Pittsburgh Steelers vs Dallas Cowboys). Frankenheimer dares to include a couple of ambitiously complex crane shots to tie in the plot with the event. There are many shots of Robert Shaw in front of crowds that are too huge to fake, with the game going on behind him.


The Paramount DVD is an anamorphic 2.35 widescreen presentation, with optional 5.1 audio. I found the picture to be slightly too squeezed - faces looking too tall and thin - but that's just a niggle. Surely it's time to market it as a political thriller rather than keep on using the bloody blimp! Presumably they still haven't seen Woody Allen's Every Thing You Wanted To know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask (1972), as this artwork always reminds me of the sketch where the giant killer boob goes on the rampage...


John William's soundtrack has just been released for the first time ever, on CD - more details from Film Score Monthly here.

THE CASSANDRA CROSSING (1976) - outbreak on a train

THE CASSANDRA CROSSING

(1976, West Germany, Italy, UK)

This just beat Silver Streak to being the first seventies disaster movie on a train, but the accent here was on suspense and doom, rather than comedy. Back then it certainly delivered, though the posters and publicity made me expect something more sci-fi, like The Andromeda Strain. I re-watched this just before a recent trip to Geneva, where the journey begins.

The opening titles lead into a spectacular helicopter shot descending from the clouds, swooping low over Lake Geneva (when the huge fountain was unfortunately switched off), down over the United Nations European Headquarters and up to the World Health Organisation building. Inside, several terrorists force their way into top secret laboratories and during a shoot-out with the guards, one gets splashed with a nasty virus...

This leads neatly to a simple movie premise - hundreds of passengers trapped on a train with a killer virus. Luckily there's an action-hero scientist onboard, his ex-wife and a host of disposal disaster movie stereotypes. There's an early lowpoint with a singsong in one compartment, but after the silly soap-opera interlude, it turns back into a tight thriller as the nightmare deepens.

Eventually the American military find out about the missing terrorist potentially infecting everyone on the train. The Colonel in charge orders the train not to stop and that no-one gets off. Just to make sure, the train takes on armed guards and has its windows boarded up, in an eerie nighttime scene with the soldiers dressed in bio-hazard suits. Anyone who tries to escape will be shot. The all-white outfits might be accurate, but they also reminded me of George Romero's own 'outbreak' horror The Crazies (1973). The following year, there was a similar-looking clean-up squad in David Cronenberg's Rabid (1977).

In these contagion movies the symptoms can go two ways - if it's a thriller then the virus simply kills, like The Andromeda Strain (1971) or Outbreak (1995). If it's a horror film then the infected turn into mindless killers, as in The Crazies, Rabid, right upto 28 Days Later.

Besides the spreading virus, there's the lengths the army will go to prevent the secret of their bio-weapon getting out. Either way, time is running out for the passengers as the train nears the end of the line, the rickety Cassandra Crossing...

With a simple premise, mounting complications and a memorably callous climax, this is also a movie full of familiar faces.Sharing top-billing are Burt Lancaster, Sophia Loren and Richard Harris, all bringing glamour to an endless string of seventies thrillers. Harris was an unlikely, thoughtful action hero throughout the seventies in Juggernaut, Orca - The Killer Whale and Golden Rendezvous... though today he seems mainly remembered for his curtain-call as Dumbledore. Personally, I'd rather see him battle Orca...
Ava Gardner bounces back from her disaster movie experience of Earthquake (1974), invigorated here by toyboy Martin Sheen, who's still in a rut of greasy villains, looking exactly as he does as the predatory paedo in The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane (also 1976). If you ever wanted to see more of Martin doing half-naked yoga, like the opening of Apocalypse Now, this movie is for you...

In the tradition of disaster movies, there's too many characters set up, so that later they can be cruelly cut down... including a host of actors more famous from their European cult movies - John Philip Law (Barbarella), Alida Valli (Suspiria), Ingrid Thulin (Salon Kitty). Not to mention OJ Simpson (The Towering Inferno) as a priest!

Ann Turkel is presumably here because her husband was Richard Harris. She's paired onscreen with Italian actor Ray Lovelock - yes, the star of Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue (1975), but without his beard! I didn't recognise him without the facial hair, wearing a woolly ski sweater!
Last but not least is the father of method acting, Lee Strasberg. His skimpy watch salesman character gains dramatic weight when he realises that the train is taking him back to the internment camp he was imprisoned in during the war. For a major proponent of stage acting, this is a rare movie role, his most acclaimed screen appearance being in The Godfather. Heaven only knows what made him do a European disaster movie.

The Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack certainly helps. He uses a few creepy virus sounds that he first used for The Satan Bug (1965).

All in all, a fast-paced thriller blended into the disaster movie genre.

I've been watching a VHS all this time and am looking for a decent version on DVD. I've got the Carlton DVD - it's widescreen but letterboxed, non-anamorphic, and the negative needs a little restoration work for dirt and scratches - but at least it's available. I'll keep lhoping for an anamorphic remastered version...

A widescreen YouTube trailer from TCM...

THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE (1961) - global warning

THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE

(1961, UK)

Altogether an enjoyably adult sci-fi thriller, verging on apocalyptic and ringing remarkably true during our anxieties over global warming. This film shows us what it could all look like...

The day after watching this tale of an apocalyptic heatwave and its effects on London, we had the worst snowfall in the capital in 18 years. There was an eerie synchronicity between the movie's freak weather disasters, and the actual city in chaos.

Despite being in black and white, the movie still feels very modern, and far more believable than recent Hollywood disaster movies, like The Day After Tomorrow, where global catastrophes become a series of dramatic obstacle courses for the heroes.



The Day The Earth Caught Fire uses a more believable approach, showing the gradual effects of a world that keeps getting hotter, triggered by a series of nuclear tests. Currently it rings true with many modern anxieties about global warming and abnormal weather. When I saw this on TV in the 1970s, it just felt like pure science fiction, When it was made, the worry centred on the unknown side-effects of nuclear testing.

The film, is greatly helped by a snappy, unstereotypical cast of characters, mainly the staff at a London newspaper, hearing the news first and trying to uncover what's being withheld. The dialogue is even faster than modern films, to match the hectic environment of daily newspaper deadlines, but the boy/girl banter is just as fast and frequently witty. It's a telling sign that director Val Guest was balancing the doom with verbal parrying between the characters. Guest had previously written film scripts for a long line of British comedians, including Will Hay, Arthur Askey and The Crazy Gang. Though this is suitably more high-brow humour.


Besides a solid science-fiction premise, strongly defined characters, an endearing cast (with the exception of Edward Judd’s boozy, stroppy malcontent), it's a gritty and realistic look at the effects of a few months of non-stop global warming. There are many special effects to sell the cyclone, drought and freak fog hitting various London landmarks. Fairly tight on budget, Les Bowie and his team, which included future special effects wizard Brian Johnson, convincingly use matte paintings, blow-up photographs and crisp back projection, plus some spectacular stock footage.

Though the visual effects occasionally look impressionistic rather than real, the story is sold by the consistently sweaty cast. As temperatures soar, lawlessness breaks out and passions rise. I was surprised at how risque Janet Munro actually gets to look in this. Not revealingly nude, but very nearly almost… and complemented by subtly fruity dialogue.

Left to right: Edward Judd, Janet Munro and Leo McKern

You may have also seen leading man Edward Judd as the star of the Ray Harryhausen’s First Men In The Moon (1964), as well as the considerably lower budget Island of Terror. Leo McKern as a fellow reporter is a well-loved British comedian and actor, most famous as top TV barrister Rumpole of the Bailey. But I prefer to watch him in his zany comedy roles, such as the chief villain chasing Ringo and The Beatles in Help! (1965), and as Moriarty chasing Gene Wilder in The Aventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975). You’ve probably seen him in the first two films in 1970s The Omen series as Bugenhagen, the frazzled archaeologist, where he coincidentally appeared with Janet Munro’s second husband, Ian Hendry. Munro should have had many more good parts, but you may have seen her in Walt Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson, or singing with Sean Connery in Darby O’Gill and the Little People (hopefully you haven’t) or even battling crawling eyes in The Trollenberg Terror.

Keen eyes might even recognise a couple of the reporters, Michael Goodliffe also appeared in Hammer's The Gorgon and To The Devil A Daughter, and Edward Underdown starred in The Hand of Night. There's even a young Michael Caine in a bit part as a policeman, just before his movie career took off.

The only blot on this landscape is the casting of the real life editor of the Daily Express newspaper. No doubt this allowed the crew to shoot in and around the actual Fleet Street building and around the printing presses, but Arthur Christiansen is an editor and not an actor, which makes for a few bizarre scenes. Though the main set of the newsroom is a faithful studio replica of the actual thing.

This is also an example of the mini-genre of British apocalypse movies where everyone takes refuge in a pub, rather than a church (see also Devil Girl From Mars and The Earth Dies Screaming). Trivia fans take note that one of the main exterior shooting locations is London's Battersea Fun Fair, which was also central to the action during the story of the giant monster Gorgo (1960).

Director Val Guest of course masterfully directed the Hammer versions of The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass 2, as well as the recently released (on DVD) caveman vs dinosaur flick When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth.

I got the DVD in order to finally see this in 2.35 widescreen, an unusual experience in monochrome, but was surprised that it was a far better film than I’d remembered - repeated 1.33 'pan-and-scan' TV viewings certainly didn't do it any favours. The region 2 PAL DVD, from Network, has remastered this with a fine-looking picture and sharp audio, and also restores a hot red monochrome tint, that I’d never seen before, to some scenes. Together with the extras – a recent interview with Leo McKern, trailers, behind-the-scenes photos and background notes, plus a commentary track from the late director, this is a very welcome, well-rounded release. Looks like Australia also have a DVD out as well.



Here's the trailer on YouTube, complete with correct aspect ratio, tinting, and spoilers!

THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974) - a giant among disaster movies

THE TOWERING INFERNO
(1974, USA)

During my Earthquake review, I hinted that The Towering Inferno was the mother of all disaster movies, certainly in the seventies cycle. It was exciting to see this in the cinema in 1975 (the UK got most films about six months later than the US), and it still stands up very well today - not something you can say of all Irwin Allen's movie productions. The non-CGI stuntwork and big-name cast is hard to beat. I’d finally got it on anamorphic widescreen DVD earlier this year, and Paul Newman's recent passing prompted me to finally watch it.

Most disaster movies can only be enjoyed with more suspension of disbelief than usual – how often do ocean liners capsize, how often do bees attack? But skyscraper fires are all too plausible – though I admit that at the time, I thought it was another over-the-top impossible Hollywood fantasy. Watching it now, it’s hard not to think of 9/11. When the World Trade Center was on fire, I was naively expecting all the rescue attempts that I’d seen in The Towering Inferno to be rolled out. I wondered why the nearby helicopter rides weren’t airlifting people off the roof. It’s beyond ironic that the filmmakers had the newly-built Twin Towers in mind when making The Towering Inferno. The film was intended as entertainment, but also acted as a vivid reminder of the dangers on the inadequacy of tall building fire regulations and building standards.


Although it now reminds me of the tragic end of the Twin Towers, the film rises to this retrospective challenge and still holds up today, showing the realities of big fires, and depicting the fire department’s heroism. Admittedly, there are a few too many explosions to pump up the visual excitement, but for Irwin Allen this is restrained. From the promotional films (available on the second disc of the special edition) and the garish gory pre-production art of various overly inventive death scenes, one can only presume that other producers and saner heads managed to tone down the bodycount in favour of good taste.

When starting work on the movie, one of those periodic Hollywood coincidences cropped up - two film studios had the same idea at the same time. In fact, two studios had bought books about skyscraper fires, The Glass Inferno and The Tower. With the WTC newly up, this was not an uncommon worry in America, or even worldwide at the time. The studios, for once, combined efforts and scripts to make one huge movie. One wonders why they haven’t done it since - with the various Robin Hood, Christopher Columbus, meteor’s hitting Earth, head-to-head box office clashes.

Inferno is the best of the disaster movies, with the great cast, grand scale, and a tight story delivering continuing logical peril, and a quite terrifying situation. Faulty wiring sabotages the opening ceremony of the tallest skyscraper in the world. As the guests celebrate in a party at the top of the tower, little do they realise that a fire halfway up the building is closing in on them. As the fire department works slowly up the building, various risky rescue methods are needed to try and get everyone out – including the architect, the Mayor. With so many characters, the story takes a while to tell, but the time flies by. In the cinema, this even had a half-time intermission.


It’s a very special cast, with the late Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and William Holden all expecting top billing. Faye Dunaway (The Eyes of Laura Mars, Network, Bonnie and Clyde) adds frosty sex appeal and additional suspense as she tries not to pop out of her evening dress. Wrinkly but still perky, dancer Fred Astaire and Jennifer Jones (A Portrait of Jennie) are the token oldies. Richard Chamberlain (Dr Kildare, The Three Musketeers), Robert Wagner (The Pink Panther) and Robert Vaughn (The Man From UNCLE) are the younger things. O.J. Simpson (Capricorn One) plays the head of security.

McQueen chose the fire chief role thinking it was the best part, but he spends all his time dashing around, ridiculously doing all the toughest rescues himself, reminiscent of T.J. Hooker ignoring all his younger staff. I remember his (very brief) swearing in the film was new to family certificated films back then. Paul Newman gets far more acting time and comes off as a more real and likeable character.


The fire-fighting scenes look genuinely dangerous, setting a high standard of spectacle and stuntwork unequalled until Backdraft came along in 1991. The superb 100-foot high model looks all the more spectacular for largely being shot at night, as does the back-projection and compositing work. Even the model helicopters smoothly intercut with the real thing. The gigantic and fully-functional sets put the money up on the screen. The streets of San Francisco take a pounding from having dozens of fire tenders speeding to the rescue.

British director John Guillerman directed the non-action sequences – getting sobering and dramatic performances out of a great cast. This is one disaster movie that doesn't feel padded out with melodrama. The film's success must have lead to Guillerman being invited to make another event movie - the remake of King Kong (1976).


There's an early pre-Jaws score from John Williams, illustrating how much of his early career was with Irwin Allen - from the theme tunes for TV shows like Lost In Space and Land of the Giants, and into the big time movies with this and The Poseidon Adventure, all produced by Allen. The album was my first of many Williams soundtracks, though naturally it was on vinyl. The score was expanded and released on CD back in 2001, but is out of print now.

Last year, we took time to visit the Bank of America building in San Francisco, used as the main shooting location in the film, as the entrance plaza to 'The Glass Tower'. Unfortunately, nowadays the public aren't allowed inside. However, the suspenseful glass elevator scene was inspired by the wall-hugging elevators at the nearby Hyatt Regency. The spectacular hotel lobby, and its elevators, briefly appear in the film and are well worth a visit. It also served as a pivotal location in Mel Brooks' High Anxiety.

I watched The Towering Inferno on the region 1 DVD special edition (pictured at the top), which includes a second disc full of original promotional featurettes and a very interesting gossipy TV special about the making of the film and the on set clash of personalities of the mega-cast.


I'll also mention the DVD of The Fantasy Worlds of Irwin Allen as an excellent documentary career overview of all his iconic films and TV shows, full of rare footage and insightful interviews. But "Danger, danger", it might make you buy a lot of DVD boxsets...

There's more about Irwin Allen here, and a huge marvellous site dedicated to The Towering Inferno here.

KING KONG (1976) - monstrous disaster movie

KING KONG(1976, USA)

Sitting on a shelf of DVDs, or lost in a list of downloads, movie's are completely stripped of the advertising campaigns that launched them, no matter how massive the original hoopla. This King Kong was one of the biggest films of the year, with pages of newspaper and magazine coverage heralding its arrival. An early 'event movie', hoping to follow up on the Jaws phenomenon of the previous year, combining an animal-on-the-rampage with a disaster movie.

This 1976 retelling is widely regarded as inferior to the 1933 original, and its special effects and lack of ambition pale against Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake. But, as noted here on the Classic Horror Forum, it was nevertheless an influence on Jackson's version. I have a soft spot for this very seventies blockbuster, not that I don't regard Kongs 1933 and 2005 more highly, but I’ll also watch this one just as often.

 

Flashing back to the 1970's, I had yet to see the original 1930s King Kong. In magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland it looked like the best monster movie ever, full of dinosaurs and city-stomping. I was fascinated by dinosaurs and stop-motion animation, watching every Ray Harryhausen movie that I could. Ray had trained with King Kong’s special effects creator Willis O’Brien, and his movies forwarded the spirit of Kong’s adventure.

But I must have missed it on TV in the UK (until the early 1980s), and home video didn't exist yet. So the closest I could get was a comic book version of the story, a novelisation, and reading through the well-illustrated book, 'The Making of King Kong' by Orville Goldner and George E. Turner.

That's why the first Kong I got to see was the Dino De Laurentiis’ remake in 1977, when it reached the UK. The publicity was huge, concentrating on the full-scale Kong 'robot' that had been built, designed by Carlo Rambaldi (halfway between doing gory effects on Italian horror movies, and building E.T. for Spielberg). The wall-to-wall robot stories even made critics and audiences believe that the it performed the whole film! The publicity toned down the involvement of young FX make-up specialist Rick Baker, who worked with Rambaldi on the cable-controlled (an early version of animatronics) mask for the ape suit that Baker wore. He performed the bulk of Kong's shots throughout the film. In later films, he went on to perfect his 'ape suits' to uncanny effect, like in Gorillas in the Mist, as well as designing the shocking transformation FX in American Werewolf in London, The Thing and more recently Hellboy, among many other classic creations.

Storywise, King Kong '76 improves on rival versions with a story that launches straight away with the ship heading off for Skull Island, this time in search of oil, a rare and expensive commodity in that inflation-ridden decade. Hippyish animal-lover Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges looking like a younger version of The Dude from The Big Lebowski) stows away onboard, forewarned that a big ape may also be on the island. Along the way, they rescue shipwrecked, scantily-clad Dwan, (Jessica Lange in her first screen role).



All the action is handsomely mounted, using real oil tankers and ships, and a bewilderingly large full-scale fogbank that hangs around the island. A spectacular Hawaiian location is used for the beach landing, and then the explorers encounter the immense wall that divides the island. That's in fact a gigantic full-scale outdoor ‘set’ - there’s no doubting there’s a lot of money on the screen and it’s looking good, until Kong turns up.

Compare and contrast - Rick Baker behind the mask...

As Dwan gets kidnapped and given to Kong. I realised that Kong wasn’t a giant robot at all, but a man in a suit composited into the live-action using the variable blue-screen optical process, which rarely blends all the elements together. All was not lost, but such an uncomplicated effect wasn't convincing. What saves this depiction of Kong are the close-ups of his face. Seeing Baker's real eyes behind the mask brings this Kong very much to life. And the amount of expressiveness in the mask is still very impressive.

The actual robot is only glimpsed head to foot in a couple of scenes, where it is almost completely static. But closer scenes successfully use the full-scale foot and hand, much like Jurassic Park, and it’s full-scale T Rex hydraulics. A huge gorilla arm and hand swinging through a set are perfectly convincing. No CGI, no dodgy compositing, just large-scale engineering and stuntwork.

... and the face of the full-size robot

Hollywood’s last resort in special effects is to use a man in a suit, and they haven’t put the years of expertise that the Japanese had built up. There’s simply not enough detail in the modelwork in the Kong suit scenes. While contemporary critics would scoff at the Godzilla films, the producers could have learned a lot from the expert use of slow-motion to increase the scale, low-angle camerawork could also have helped sell the idea of suited Kong. The central action scenes, such as the log bridge and Kong’s lair are both disappointingly fakey-looking sets. Compared to the expense of building the gigantic wall, why did they skimp on the ape scenes?

To the credit of the cast, they try and play it straight, Jeff Bridges certainly doing his best. Jessica Lange seemed a little phased thoughout, or was that her character? Back then, she convinced me that she was a bubble-headed blonde and I’d never see her act in anything ever again. Of course, she went on to garner far better parts, wide acclaim and two Oscars! Charles Grodin (Midnight Run) is believable as the nasty expedition leader, with the always watchable Rene Auberjonois (Deep Space Nine, Boston Legal) as his assistant.

There’s a chance to hear Jack O'Halloran’s rich voice – for Superman 2 he played Non, the mute super-criminal sidekick to General Zod. Rather riskily, John Agar appears in a bit part as the Mayor - casting the star of so many low-budget, frankly terrible monster movies surely begs us to draw comparisons, though here the budget is clearly higher than The Brain of Planet Arous.

The climax is both sad and surreal. The twin towers of the then recently erected World Trade Centre remind Kong of his mountain lair. As he climbs up it, and the Army congregates in the plaza. It’s hard to concentrate on the action without reflecting how dramatically the location has changed. Manhattan was used extensively for many movies during the 1970s, and the WTC was one of the city’s most identifiable and spectacular settings. By the time Peter Jackson's film was released, the Empire State Building was once again the tallest building in the city.



Throughout the film, some special effects work, some don’t. But it tells the story, and the large scale of the film still entertains. It’s sort of dated, seventies wise, but this adds to the fun. Though I’m now very aware that this version lacks a huge dollop of what the 1933 and 2005 movies have - style. Thirties fashion, architecture and design make the setting classy and atmospheric.

It’s largely a retelling of the original story, but the filmmakers have trouble keeping a straight face in making a monster movie, particularly when it comes to the dialogue. Scriptwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr, midway between the tongue-in-cheek 1966 TV Batman, and the 1980 comedy Flash Gordon, adds too many in-jokes, defusing the drama.



John Barry’s soundtrack, one of my favourites of his, takes the entire film up several notches, in atmosphere and anticipation. If only the visuals matched the grandeur of his music. Listening to the score, which has a few choice sound effects mixed in, always encourages me to imagine a better film.

King Kong '76 isn't perfect. I've pointed out most of the huge shaggy flaws. It's not the epic it aspired to be, but is still enjoyable for the cast, the scale and the locations. And compared to the 1986 sequel, King Kong Lives, also directed by John Guillerman (The Towering Inferno), it looks like a classic.

Oodles more Kong here, on KongisKing.net!

JUGGERNAUT (1974) - a very British disaster movie

JUGGERNAUT

(1974, UK)

As the American disaster movie genre gained momentum in the seventies, this British film depicted a grittier, more realistic and suspenseful alternative. Before the list of possible disasters soon ran out, Juggernaut was an early example of a plot that sidestepped natural disasters in favour of man-made terrors - there'd soon be endangered aircraft (Airport '75), subway trains (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three), packed sports stadiums (Two Minute Warning and Black Sunday) and funfairs (Rollercoaster).

Juggernaut, with an entire ocean liner held hostage, matched Hollywood for tension and accurately portrayed the stressfulness of the hostage situation. There’s a taut parallel race against time as the police desperately try to track down the identity of the bomber, while disposal experts tackle the seven booby-trapped drums of explosives - if any three explode, the ship will sink. The blackmailer calls himself ’Juggernaut’ and detonates warning blasts to prove that he’s not bluffing. Either pay up, or lose the ship and all onboard…

There's a scene in the film that's famous, but you probably don’t realise it was shown here first. Where the crucial decision has to be made – to cut the blue wire or the red wire.


Another gripping sequence is the bomb squad’s parachute jump to get to the liner. Rough seas prevent the passengers from abandoning ship, they also make getting onboard a lethal and hazardous task.


Using the disaster movie ploy of having an ensemble cast spread across the poster, it stars Richard Harris and David Hemmings, who engagingly represent the best of the bomb squad. Omar Sharif is the increasingly desperate captain. A young Anthony Hopkins is in charge of the frantic police investigation on land, even though his wife and kids are onboard.

From the US, are actors Shirley Knight (recently seen in Desperate Housewives as Bree’s Mother-In-Law) as a freewheeling ‘guest’ at the captain’s table, and Clifton James (a more deserved and reserved character than the comedy redneck Sheriff Culpepper he’s famous for in Live and Let Die). The supporting cast include the formidable Ian Holm (Alien, Brazil), Freddie Jones (The Elephant Man, Dune), and John Stride (The Omen, Brannigan).

Director Richard Lester, in between the brilliant Three and Four Musketeers films and Superman II, adds to the wry sense of gallows humour among the doomed passengers, in particular the attempts of the entertainment officer (the fantastic Roy Kinnear) to lift their spirits. Once again, Lester adds snippets of dialogue to almost every character onscreen, no matter how incidental.


Not sure why this DVD has been renamed with such a TV movie title as Terror on the Britannic. Even in the UK, the DVD doesn’t go under its original cinema release title, (even though Juggernaut thankfully remains the onscreen title). This kind of retitling is a good way to lose sales.

Even so, this remains just as taut and exciting as it was in the cinema, and is a welcome remastering in 16:9 widescreen.

More Juggernaut images at MoviePoster.com.

KRAKATOA - EAST OF JAVA (1969) - or is it west?

KRAKATOA - EAST OF JAVA
(1969, USA)

Nice visual effects, shame about the songs

After reading Eugene Lourie's book 'My Work In Films' (1985, Harvest/HBJ) and how his methods for recreating volcanic special effects for Crack In The World (1965) were later reused in Krakatoa - East of Java, I thought it was about time to see it in widescreen. It's also just been released on DVD in the UK.

Lourie worked as a production designer for Jean Renoir in France, then fled the Nazi invasion to live in the USA, where he also designed special effects and started to direct (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Behemoth the Sea Monster, and of course Gorgo). He later returned to Europe, often favouring Spain for both studio and location filming – just as he did for Krakatoa – East of Java.

According to Lourie it was shot in 70mm, but the credits call it Cinerama (a process of filming with three cameras line up next to each other), which indicates that the film was destined for gigantic screens. Specifically for Cinerama theatres, (you could think of it as an IMAX for the fifties), extra long point-of-view shots are included to add to a rollercoaster feeling. On a huge screen, when the camera spins around, or tilts like a boat in the rough seas, the audience are going to get more than a movie but an experience, possibly of nausea.


While the bulk of the action is a grim adventure, the Cinerama label demands something more of a family film, resulting in an unlikely triple volley of songs at the start! These are in addition to the three-way splitscreen musical montage of spoilers behind the opening titles, again trying to look like true three-camera Cinerama.

There’s then a bizarre schoolsong, coaxed along by two sweaty nuns, trying to distract a class of frightened children from a volcanic eruption. This mystifying scene doesn't gain significance for nearly two hours of screen time! After a dollop of dockside exposition, there's a rather modern ‘west coast’ pop ballad as the steamship 'Batavia Queen' sets sail. After more introductions to the key characters onboard, there's a third song, staged like a screen musical, as over-the-hill chorus girl Charley dances and ickily vamps her ageing boyfriend. Considering the duration, these songs feel like inappropriate padding, and a disastrous way to start a catastrophe.

Thankfully it settles down to a more even keel, with grittier dramatic conflict and the eerie signs that a huge eruption is imminent. Little do the crew realise, it'll be the hugest Earthly explosion in recorded history! But this is no documentary, more like a Jules Vernean adventure.


The Captain is more interested in a fortune in pearls and has recruited a diverse A-Team of experts. To scout for the wreck, there are two balloonists and a guy with a diving bell. To retrieve the booty, there’s a deep sea diver aided by Japanese pearl divers, with very impressive lungs.

The script pushes hard some unusually liberal sixties amoralising, considering it’s supposed to be 1883, with some strident messages about relationships outside of marriage, judgemental attitudes about murderers, forgiveness... All this and an opium drug dream montage too.

There's so much going on onboard, no wonder everyone isn’t bothered about the pumice mortars flying overhead, and the endless volcanic explosions. As they get closer to their goal, the story contrives to take the audience down inside the crater just as it’s warming up, right past the lava flows as it starts to erupt (in a marvellously hellish scene reminiscent of the climax of The Black Hole), and hangs around to experience both the final explosion and subsequent tsunami.


The visual effects range from silly to spectacular. The balloon looks like a small model, as does the master shot of Krakatoa (stupidly, this shot is on the cover of the Anchor Bay DVD). As the action moves closer in, the huge tenth-scale model of the steamship set against the exploding lava is a hugely complex setpiece, that makes for a convincing and exciting scene, the deck getting pummelled by flaming debris. Basically the special effects get more impressive as the film progresses.

Lourie’s special effects help carry the film, along with the solid cast. Maximilian Schell (who had command of a spaceship in The Black Hole) is convincing as the single-minded Captain, sparring with junkie diver Brian Keith (The Wind and the Lion, The Zoo Gang, Meteor) and a hold full of convicts, lead by J.D. Cannon (the angry Police Chief in McCloud). The father and son balloonists are played by Rossano Brazzi (The Italian Job, Omen III: The Final Conflict) and Sal Mineo (Rebel Without a Cause, Escape from the Planet of the Apes). Geoffrey Holder (Baron Samedi in Live and Let Die) appears imposingly, but doesn’t get a single line of dialogue. Also keep your eyes peeled if you want to see Eugene Lourie himself, in a brief appearance as a lighthouse keeper.

It’s a mad example of a catastrophe movie, the link between the old historical epics of the fifties and the disaster movies of the seventies. But even The Towering Inferno had a song in it…


The Anchor Bay disc had a sharp picture and a generous anamorphic widescreen presentation (with a full-frame option on the flipside). Since then, it's been re-released on DVD by MGM in the US, and last month by Fremantle in the UK.

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VIRUS (1980) - whoops apocalypse

VIRUS
(1980, Japan)

Slow, grim, apocalyptic disaster that might eventually haunt…

I tried to upgrade my tatty old VHS copy of Virus by buying a recent DVD release, only to find that while it’s called 'The Director's Cut', it’s shorter than my VHS copy, and it isn’t widescreen, while the VHS was!

Both the UK and US DVD releases are listed as 1.33 – which means they are severely cropped down from the original widescreen, an injustice to the spectacular location cinematography, one of the few saving graces that Virus has to offer.

The running time of 100 minutes represents the international cut (which failed to get a cinema release in the UK or US, back in 1980), a whole hour shorter than the original version released in Japan.

One of the US DVD releases

The UK DVD starts with a long explanatory build up as the deadly MM88 virus is stolen and then accidentally exposed. The introductory scenes are full of badly disguised exposition, using unknown actors, giving the wrong impression of the film that is about to unfold. Only when the virus begins to kill large numbers of people around the world, does the story take off. Some horrifying scenes of riots breaking out around the world are taken from actual news footage, including a very nasty incident where a protester catches on fire.

As recognisable actors appear, they are lumbered with embarrassing dialogue and melodramatic conflicts. Unlike more recent apocalypse stories which ground the story among the public, this is very Japanese in structure – where huge disasters are only dealt with by the authorities. Politicians, military, scientists receive the latest news and use cold, hard logic.

Some of the Japanese scenes are the most involving – where a hospital is overrun with people needing treatment, and the police have to burn piles of bodies in the streets, unable to cope with the mounting death toll. But these scenes are just illustrations, aside from the main drive of the story in the Oval Office. Glenn Ford plays the US President, aided by Robert Vaughn, whose lumbered with some very awkward direction...

This DVD cover illustrates the missing prologue scene

As the board meetings continue among the last people on Earth – in Antarctica, where the virus can’t survive the low temperatures. The new World Council includes a young Edward James Olmos. Even a case of rape is coldly discussed in a meeting. The ratio of 855 men to 8 women is simply unfortunate. The women will have to have babies with new multiple partners. Well at least condemn the rapist, guys!

Many different countries are represented reasonably well, but casting Chuck Connors as a British submarine captain is bizarre. The actor normally plays cowboys. Two cheeky cockneys represent the British crew in yet another example of the Mary Poppins/Dick Van Dyke stereotype.

The overall story is realistic, doomladen and slowly paced. The vision of a world decimated by a biological warfare accident, and a climactic plot twist may haunt anyone who stays awake to the very end of the movie.

The worldwide locations are impressive, especially among the polar icebergs. Though there are unusual choices of establishing shots for various capital cities. Kinji Fukasaku (Battle Royale) directs, favouring the Japanese scenes and actors. But without their back-stories, and without a fluent command of English, it’s hard to know why they are the only civilians at the centre of the action.

The prologue on my old Intervision VHS seems to be taken from the climax of the longer Japanese version, which is supposed to be a superior experience all round. As it stands, this is another example of the Japanese spending a huge budget aiming at international success, and floundering badly. The tedious Sayonara Jupiter also springs to mind - a huge budgeted, internationally cast, botched, sci-fi catastrophe...

Gotterdammerung has a host of screengrabs and plot spoilers if you want to investigate Virus further...

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