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Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

When Time Ran Out…


Producer Irwin Allen who created two of the all-time great disaster movies (The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure) struggled to recapture the magic of those two films with The Swarm and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure failing to live up to those prior heights. In 1980, he tried one last time. The result was When Time Ran Out.

Set on a tropical island, Paul Newman plays oil company operator whose delving for crude not far from an active volcano that hasn’t erupted in decades. The entire operation is bankrolled by a conniving businessman (James Franciscus) who refuses to acknowledge that there’s any threat to the hotel he’s built with his wife’s (Veronica Hamel) father (William Holden). We all know that the volcano will eventually blow, but as with all of these spectacles, who will survive.

In addition to Newman and Holden, numerous prominent actors of the period star in the film including Jacqueline Bisset, Edward Albert, Red Buttons, Valentina Cortese, Alex Karras, Burgess Meredith, Ernest Borgnine, and Pat Morita (not quite a name at that time, but quite familiar to audiences now). Who survives and who dies is a guessing game, though there are hints as to their fates periodically. That’s simply the nature of a film of this and is part of the fun.

The narrative is familiar and the events unfold almost exactly as you expect. A couple of notable scenes are played for suspense with long takes and tense music. For modern audiences these might be unbearable because they are lengthy scenes, but they are almost mesmerizing to anyone that’s not bothered by them. The performances are fine, though a bit one-note. The effects are adequate to a point, though the scenes that feature “explosions” are poorly edited and the effects are antiquated.

It’s a curious trifle of the period, the end of Allen’s big screen career and largely the end of an genre and era, a genre that would not be resusicated for more than a decade.

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