Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979)

BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE

This is a fair movie to watch and a must have for anybody who wants to comeplet there POSEIDON ADVENTURE movie set this movie puicks up after the first group of people is taken off the upside down ocean liner the movie is fair but not is good as the first one. August 22, 2008

What was Irwin thinking???

I was 13 when I saw the original Poseidon Adventure, and was mezzmerized by it! Being the first big screen action packed flick i'd ever seen..it was HUGE!
When this sequal came out in august of 1979 I was first in line!..wow..what an aweful movie. their was no thought, special effects acting, script or much of any of Irwin Allens talents in this...what happened?? budget problems? what? it was filmed with such a low cost feel too it, lots of stock footage from the original, poor set designs! I wish Irwin would have made a sequal to the book that Paul Gallico did focusing on the aftermath and used the characters from the original film instead of all these top stars of the day and altered the story so much.
I still pop it in and watch it from time to time and keep hopeing i'll find something good about it...
February 2, 2008

Not a complete washout

"I knew it! I knew my luck couldn't be that bad! Nothing was going to get worse because nothing could've!" Wrong again. A couple of years after swearing nothing on Earth would make him leave the UK, Michael Caine went into tax exile in Hollywood and signed up for a slew of "But it looked good on paper" pictures, getting off to an inauspicious start with the now forgotten period comedy Harry and Walter Go to New York, a huge flop so horrendously expensive that it very nearly bankrupted Columbia Pictures if they hadn't been bailed out by a consortium of German dentists. He must have thought his luck had changed when he signed for not one but two Irwin Allen disaster movies - after all, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno had been massive hits, so this was the big leagues at last. After The Swarm was met with worldwide ridicule and disastrous box-office, a lesser man might have cut his losses, but being a man who doesn't have the words 'no' or 'quality control' in his vocabulary, Caine went ahead and made Beyond the Poseidon Adventure anyway. Still, it could have been worse. He could have stuck around for Allen's career-killing volcano flick When Time Ran Out as well.

Lured away from his old stamping ground 20th Century Fox to Warner Bros with the promise of less studio interference (read quality control), bigger budgets and the chance to direct his films as well, even Spielberg would envy the kind of absolute unquestioned power 'master of disaster' Allen enjoyed on the lot in the late Seventies, but the blank check resulted in three massive and much-ridiculed flops in a row. This was number two. Allen's belated and quickly forgotten sequel to his 1972 blockbuster has a bigger budget than its predecessor and an even sillier plot, yet as a guilty pleasure it's a surprisingly enjoyable brain-off time-filler. Discarding the plot of Gallico's novel, itself written as a direct sequel to the film rather than his original novel, the film sees Michael Caine's tough tugboat captain (yes, it's a stretch) and his crew of two, Karl Malden and Sally Field, seeing a way out of impending bankruptcy by staking claim to the salvage rights to the capsized liner but having more luck saving another handful of survivors than holding onto their loot while finding themselves in competition with a rival group of 'rescuers.' Of course, we know they're really baddies - they're wearing white, they're polite and they're lead by Telly Savalas in Ernst Stavro Blofeld mode, posing as a doctor but really in search of the Poseidon's cargo of plutonium. No, really. How else could you include gun battles and an axe-killing in a disaster movie? Not that Gallico's novel wasn't sillier still - that featured a tiger on the loose below decks!

The characters are all of the stock variety - Malden plays the Walter Brennan role as the terminally-ill sidekick, Sally Field the Jean Arthuresque tomboy, Jack Warden the gruff blind writer and Shirley Knight his protective wife, Slim Pickens and his priceless bottle of vintage wine the hearty comic relief, Peter Boyle's 'Sarge' the over-protective father (a character drawn from Gallico's first Poseidon novel that didn't make it into the original film), Veronica Hamel the bad girl in a good dress, Shirley Jones the kind-hearted nurse and a young Mark Harmon, looking like Tom Cruise's not-too-bright and less talented older brother, sharing the juvenile romantic lead with Lost in Space veteran Angela Cartwright. Yet while no-one troubled the Oscar nominations, the performances aren't particularly bad even if Caine wouldn't top anybody's list as a ruthless old seadog, and there's nothing quite as camp as Shelley Winters and her aquatic escapades in the original: rather than an unintentional laugh-riot, for the most part this is professionally well-made nonsense.

The lousy back-projection and hosed on water in the opening storm sequence do bode ill, but once it's shipboard the production values visibly improve (it's well photographed by Joseph Biroc and nicely designed by Preston Ames), though the film makes surprisingly little of the upside down sets and, unlike the original, there's no sense of the rising water cutting off their way back to up the tension. Here the water mainly seems to rush by rather than climb up. Perhaps still feeling the critics' stings at his bee movie, this time the script offers few hostages to fortune - dialogue like "Last night was the worst New Years' Eve party I've ever been to!" or "Oh my gosh! I just shot one of them!" "Well shoot another one!" is at least meant to be funny - but, like The Swarm, there's evidence that this went through some last-minute cuts before hitting theatres: one major character even completely disappears near the end. Still, there's some novelty in having two rival groups working their way in to the ship and climbing down to the top rather than up to the bottom. And talking of bottoms, Allen ensures that Sally Field spends about half her scenes with her back turned to the camera to emphasis how tight her wet jeans are...

The DVD doesn't include any of the deleted scenes from the TV version, though one of them does turn up on the 22-minute making of documentary included on the disc that includes ample footage of Irwin Allen hamming it up for the cameras as well as some chaotic production footage from the surface scenes. January 17, 2008

I like this movie

Of couse the stars are changed, but Michael Caine, and Sally Feild, are a nice change. September 18, 2007

Annoying movie

The DVD quality was fine, but the movie was boring and unnecessary. I loved the original, so I was hoping this sequel would be good but is wasn't. There wasn't anything original about it, and I couldn't wait for it to end. May 7, 2007

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