Schmollywood Babylon

St. Helens (Ernest Pintoff, 1981)

From TV-maestro Ernest Pintoff comes St. Helens, just a year after the actual incident inspiring the movie. What incident you ask? VOLCANO! Yes, St. Helens in Washington state erupted in 1980, killing a bunch of people and fucking up the environment around it for quite a while. This is also one of the few disaster films I haven’t seen - until now of course. Why? Because it never seemed that interesting, too serious maybe. Not enough spectacle for this these eyes. But when I found a weird (and cheap and ugly) tin box released by a subsidiary to Shout Factory I decided to finally give it a try. To my surprised it was less drama than I expected it to be, and that’s a good thing when it comes to this genre.

It’s based on - for the most time - on real characters, and in the center of this drama is the intelligent, smart and kind geologist David Jackson (played by David Huffman, who a few years later got stabbed to death by a screwdriver by a thief) and the assholish, stupid old man Harry R. Truman (Art Carney), who for some retarded reason refuses to leave the mountain when it’s about to explode. You hate him within minutes, I promise that. There’s also some local hotshot, played by the great Albert Salmi (who later shot his wife and committed suicide), who think it’s more important to allow people to camp around the volcano than to save everyone’s life, a stock character in disaster films. Well, what more to say… it’s a very standard disaster drama, but not without its merits.

But REALLY… Harry R. Truman? Was he the same stupid asshole in real life? And who can anyone who want’s to die a terrible death in a volcano eruption just because he lived there his whole life be considered a hero? He didn’t seem to be suicidal either, which could explain some stuff - and I can understand that. No, this old man just walks around being rude, mean and then dies. After Art Carney’s good performances I kinda think he deserved it. I’m not sure that was the intention. But then we have David Huffman, who’s a real star in my eyes. His performance is excellent and you really, really, really care about him. In supporting parts we see a few other excellent actors, for example Tim Thomerson, Bill McKinney and Superfly himself, Ron O’Neal!

Even if the special effects is quite bad - and mixed with stock footage and some stills of the actual eruption - the disaster towards the end becomes entertaining and is edited well. It’s one of those films where the ambitions was higher than the budget, to say the least. What I really appreciated with St. Helens is the regional feeling, the atmosphere of being a smaller film shot with local people. It’s not, but that’s how it looks. There’s always something special with those miles and miles of deep forest, beautiful lakes, unexpected fist fights, checkered shirts and pickup trucks raging on small countryside roads.

But the coolest thing with St. Helens is that the score is by Goblin. Yes, the Italian progressive rock band mostly famous for their horror films. It's not a bad score at all actually, especially when they get a chance to show off those drums and basslines! 

For a disaster film aficionado this is a must to own, but BEWARE...don’t buy the same release as I bought, from Timeless Media Group/Shout Factory. They actually released a version where EVERY “bad” word (like shit, ass, fuck etc) is bleeped out! Yeah, it’s a fucking TV-print! Scandal!

Prophecies of Nostradamus: Catastrophe 1999 (Toshio Masuda, 1974)

It’s the last flickering hours of 2014, a year with many disasters on a national and international scale. The neo-nazi (but all the liberals tend to forget this) party is the third biggest party in Sweden and even if the left won it’s hard to say if they will have any real power. We’ll see. I’ve been focusing not so much on reviewing movies but instead watching them, taking it a bit slow with the writing. I’ve been working a lot, but now - as the freelancer I am - I’m between projects and I’ve been watching so many films I can’t even count them. I’ve been revisiting some classic directors like Argento, Fulci and Bava - but also choosing a lot of stuff from my shelves I haven’t seen yet.

The last film of 2014 is a film I never seen before. I’ve been staying away from it because I wanted to see it on good quality, but I just couldn’t wait anymore. Prophecies of Nostradamus: Catastrophe 1999 came one year after Toho’s biggest hit in years, the truly powerful and smart Submersion of Japan, one of the best best disaster films ever made. I have it on two different DVD’s, the blu-ray, the remake (or new adaptation of the novel it’s based upon) and the novel itself, in a rare Swedish edition. Oh, and I have the spoof made by Minoru Kawasaki, The World Sinks Except Japan. I’ve heard there’s some Manga based on the this story also, and a terribly expensive TV-series aired the same year as the movie I’m gonna focus on from now on.

They’re a bit similar actually. The same atmosphere of dread. At the same time hopeful but also an emotional disaster for all the characters involved. Prophecies of Nostradamus bases it’s story around the prophecies of the gentleman in the title, which could be seen as a bit sloppy considering the bad rep he have. But this was the 70’s and everything was possible, and it’s a cool idea.

It tells the story of one man, the always brilliant Tetsurô Tanba, a man who always seemed very smart and radical considering his past (his father was the emperor’s physician and Tetsurô later became a spiritual leader beside his acting career), who firmly believes in the prophecies and tries to convince the government that they need to do something, they need to stop pollute the earth and destroy the nature for the sake of money. The world around them is coming to a paradigm shift, and now time is running out to fix it. Some stuff happens in the film and some stuff is theories submitted by Tetsurô’s character, Dr. Nishiyama.

And so we see the world ends, in every way possible - from earthquakes and floodings to radioactive mutants and cannibals! This is the bleakest disaster movie ever made, one that only could have been made in Japan during this time.

It’s a lot of talking heads in Prophecies of Nostradamus, but not as much as Submersion of Japan. Not saying this is a bad thing, I love talking heads if they have something good to say - and both of these films have that. The strongest point is that the filmmakers are taking it serious. How much I love Mark Robson’s Earthquake I still consider it a daytime soap compared to the Japanese counterparts, where it really never becomes exploitation. When people die is Prophecies of Nostradamus we feel it, they’re just not a stuntman in a wig in the background.

Nostradamus is also, for a disaster aficionado like me, a dream come true. Most of the disasters we leared to love in movies are present here and with the usual skills from the miniature department of Toho it looks fantastic. It also have some very impressive, almost poetic, visual effects bordering to surrealism. The up-side-down city for example, or the three suns in the sky - a phenomena “created by light interacting with ice crystals in the atmosphere”, to quote Wikipedia. It becomes disturbing towards the end when we witness the only surviving creatures on earth after the big finale… and I can understand the film at the time and later on caused some controversies - especially for a country who twiced have been slapped with a nuclear bomb over hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

Prophecies of Nostradamus: Catastrophe 1999 have a couple of cheesy moments, but it’s more connected with the time it was made - in Japan in the 70’s - than the story or filmmaking itself. This is how it was written and done and it’s friggin’ awesome. I really like my disaster films without humor and as a serious look into what we’re doing with our earth, the madness of mankind. The laughter might get struck in the throats of some people, but that’s what a movie like this should do.

I’ve seen the uncut, original Japanese version, and I wish - I WISH - Toho could just set it free, make a documentary about it, explain the history behind it and then let it roam the earth once again. Before it’s too late.

Have a good new year dear readers, and remember to check out Schmollywood Babylon on YouTube! 

The Asylum X 4 - a fever dream in front of the telly...

The last few days I’ve been having this annoying cough, tearing my throat apart. Yesterday it got worse and I also was hit with fever and yeah, I just feeling very sick. So there’s no need to go to work days like this, because it would just get worse. So instead I’m sleeping and watching movies, and when I have a fever my sense of quality gets quite low...and it’s then I watch all DTV films I have laying around, yesterday evening I watched Poseidon Rex for example (Mark L. Lester directs a marine-living T-Rex) and today I took on the biggest mission yet, to watch four movies produced by The Asylum!

First out was Age of Tomorrow, starring Kelly Hu, Anthony Marks and Robert Picardo - and it’s not, as the title can give you the illusion of, a rip-off of Edge of Tomorrow. Instead it’s an entertaining mishmash of most other science fiction films out there - from Predators, Armageddon, Avatar etc, and while it’s hardly original it’s one of the best films from The Asylum I’ve seen. It looks great, the budget is used to maximum - and there’s a lot of quite decent effects, and even physical alien-suits and a couple of surprising deaths along the way. The ending is also very downbeat, which is a winner in my eyes.

Next up was Apocalypse Pompeii, starring the only and only Adrian Paul as a ex-military man trying to rescue his family in Italy when the ol’ vocano Vesuvius once again unleashes it’s lava over unsuspecting tourists and picturesque villages around the base of it. Obviously shot in Bulgaria or some other country, it still makes an okay-ish job making it look like Italy. The effects are slightly, just slightly better than usual and most of the story is actually about Paul trying to reach his family. John Rhys-Davies hams it up in a supporting par. It’s moderately entertaining and delivers cheap thrills for us who loves our direct to video entertainment.

I felt I need to go back into the water, after yesterday’s dinosaur adventure, and decided to watch Bermuda Tentacles, which not only is a great title, it also stars Linda Hamilton and Jamie Kennedy...and John Savage “as the President”, a classic old trick in exploitation movies. Henry Fonda was the true hero doing those parts one time after another. This actually went from okay to pretty good, with the tentacles not being what we first thought the would be. The effects are nice and it creates a bigger, more expensive atmosphere during the last half. Our three guest stars are deliver quite bad performances, but I guess it was one of those paycheck days…

Last out was Android Cop, and I feel it was a missed opportunity. It stars a couple of excellent actors, Michael Jai White and Charles S. Dutton for example, but it takes it’s time to actually using the silly premise - the mayor’s daughter’s psyche is inside an android version of her and our heroes needs to get her back from the dangerous territories of LA - to full success. The action is mostly very standard, and it’s not until the end it decides to go over-the-top in a nice cheap way.

Poseidon Rex is not a movie from The Asylum, but here’s the lowdown: okay-ish. Cheap, lots of sunshine and people without clothes on the top of their bodies. Dinosaur looks good sometimes, better than the Pterodaktyls in Mark L. Lesters earlier foray into SyFy territory, Pterodaktyl. But I’m not exactly sure it’s worth buying. The only thing worth noting is that Corin Nemec was suppose to play the lead, but got badly hurt - life-threatening - one day and Brian Krause took over the part. Bad idea, because Brian is boring.

That’s all folks!

Sharknado 2: The Second One (Anthony C. Ferrante, 2014)

Sometime I wonder what the plan was with the first Sharknado. Was it a calculated cult hit, or just another goofy production from The Asylum meant to be aired and then forgotten? When it first aired, it wasn’t such a big hit - the big success rating-wise came the second time, and it didn’t take long until Sharknado 2: The Second One got the green light. In all honesty, the first one wasn’t so good - it’s one of the more sloppy and sometimes even uninspired productions from The Asylum, a company I adore. But they made a lot better films over the years. Now when the second shark-tornado hits the US it’s a lot more inspired, there’s more money, a lot of cameos, some truly insane scenes of silliness and the same crappy visual effects. It’s easy to love, believe me.

Sharknado 2 begins good, really good. Ian Ziering and Tara Reid is on an airplane to New York, suddenly a sharknado hits them and he’s forced to land when the captain of the plan, played by the one and only Robert “Airplane” Hayes (possibly the best cameo in the movie!), is sucked out during a fight with one of them sharks! The Big Apple isn’t worried, it’s probably just normal turbulence that caused the incident - or NOT! Soon a huge motherfucking Sharknado is on it’s way to New York and it’s Ian and Tara’s destiny to save some people they know - I never fully understood their connection (among them Viveca A. Fox, Mark McGrath, Judah Friedlander and the always reliable Kari Wuhrer!) - and the rest of the city of course!

First of all, Sharknado 2 is crap. It’s shit. It’s sloppy and silly and a bit lazy. But that doesn’t stop it from being very entertaining. It’s made with its heart at the right place and fully accepts it’s silliness by inject as many absurd scenes as possible. Just the sight of seeing Ian Ziering riding a shark through the air, over a disaster-ridden New York is worth the time and money. Also finally getting to know what happens during a shark attack in the subway… and is there really over-sized alligators in the New York sewers? Sharknado 2 gives us all the answers and a little bit more. Or maybe not so much more, but at least it’s not boring.

Ian and Tara seems to have a lot of fun, and does what they have to do to sell the storyline. Which kinda is the most important thing with a movie like this. You need actors who take it seriously, without them it’s a joke without a punchline. That’s why it’s a bit annoying to see some of the cameos wasted just because they don’t believe in what they’re doing - and yes, you’ll see laughing extras running in the background.

Gore? I really don’t know, but version I saw was obviously censored (because we all know that movies like these are made for kids...or not. Idiots!) and even the attacks against the sharks were more or less removed. So I can’t wait to see an unrated version. But in the end: I dig shit like this. It makes me happy. It’s list masturbation, completely harmless but nice at the moment - and then it’s forgotten. And you rarely talk with someone else about it.

Except I’m confessing here of liking Sharknado 2: The Second One. But hey, it’s my mind being fried. Not yours.

And yes, I payed some dollars for a t-shirt and a couple of other perks - including naming a shark after our cats Buster & Kitek. Here’s the proof I got from The Asylum last evening:

Dam 999 (Sohan Roy, 2011)

The Indians never really got it right when it comes to the disaster genre, expect the fun and crazy The Burning Train from 1980, which can be described as The Towering Inferno on wheels. That one flopped and maybe that’s the reason why no one ever again tried their hands on a proper, decent disaster film. But they’ve tried, and failed. The latest production to fail - at least when it comes to entertainment value - is Dam 999, a pretty pointless drama leading up to a underwhelming disaster. It’s an international co-production rooted deeply in the Indian melodrama. I like melodrama, but it needs to feel useful. You need to care about the characters, and the story - but in Dam 999 you just want every character to die a horrible death involving water and bad acting.

We follow a bunch of pretty pointless characters in their quest for love and justice around a dam. Some chick is in love with a dude and that dude is in love with her but another dude is in love with the chick and there’s a cute kid who likes his grandpa who like one of the dudes but also kinda like the other dude and there’s of course a bad dude who forced one of the dude’s dad to kill himself, leaving that dude alone with his wheelchair-bound sister. And then the dam breaks and a lot of dudes and dudettes drowns.

You know the story. We’ve seen it a million times before. Also cue a lot of Enya-style music that will evoke drama and emotions and but leaves us all more empty than before.

As you can can guess I didn’t like this one.

On the other hand, the disaster - which goes on for like two minutes in the end is quite decent and has a lengthy sequence before where one of the leading dudettes is trying to uncover the upcoming dam scandal. That part is quite okay and the disaster is also made with some cool and detailed miniatures. At least what I could see, the DVD ONLY have the 3D version and this 3D is pretty bad. No, it’s not even pretty bad, it’s very bad. But easier to watch with the glasses. And no, I don’t hate 3D. I love 3D. But this one was bad.

The movie ends quickly and with a film school quality quotation and everyone is happy it’s over. But hey, this is a disaster movie and I need to watch them all. I mean, if I have a goal in life it is to watch every disaster flick made outside the US.

Oh, Dam 999 is also a nice showcase for not-so-talented and way too young foreign backpackers playing news anchors. So good for them. Goody, goody.

If you want to see a more entertaining dam-movie, watch the Turkish “classic” The Water. The effects in that one consists of someone behind the camera pouring buckets of water on the actors.

252: Signal of Life (Nobu Mizuta, 2008)

Since the disaster all over Asia in 2004, when a Tsunami hit and claimed countless victims, several water-based disaster films have been produced in that area of the world. India gave us Dasavatharam (and also Dam 999, but I haven’t seen it yet), Thailand the extremely bad Tsunami 2022, South Korea the not-bad-at-all Haenduae, China the okay-ish Super Typhoon and in 2008 it was Japan’s turn with 252: Signal of Life, which deals with a tsunami hitting Tokyo. Sure, there’s also Japan sinks from 2006, but it deals with so many different disasters - it’s their version of 2012 and also a new version of the book that was made into the Toho masterpiece The Submersion of Japan.

I’m an emotional man and that’s also what makes me ticks when it comes to big, expensive mainstream movies. If they don’t affect me emotionally I get bored. It’s somehow easier watching soulless low budget movies because they can offer so much else - fun actors, violence, creative filmmaking etc. But a movie with a 250 million dollar budget and delivering zero on the emotional scale is completely worthless all the way through. That’s why I like watching Japanese blockbusters. They’re big on everything, EVERYTHING, to the border of being boring and visually cold, but the emotions are always there.

In 252: Signal of Life a tsunami strikes Tokyo and we follow a bunch of survivors - including the hero, a former fireman who quit because of a mistake that killed a colleague, an inventor who invested the last of his money into a new form of water cleaner for a tropical fish tanks, a South Korean illegal immigrant, a young doctor who can’t work because of his father’s depression and of course deaf little girl. They’re all trapped deep down in a subway station, not in use, and now they need to survive everything from water, loss of blood… and of course themselves. At the same time we follow the heroic rescue team above, who against all odds stays in the middle of the storm to save lives!

This film doesn’t deliver anything new at all actually. It’s an orgy of cliches, reused since the sixties and earlier. I mean, what is a disaster film if not a monster film without monsters? There’s buildings crumbling, massive amount of water killing people and of course the human drama in-between. Oh, and hail. Big fucking hail. This is the second time I start watching it and the first time I actually watched it all the way through.The first time it didn’t get me stuck. but somehow - maybe I’m in a better mood today - it went easier. The human drama is excellent, if a bit predictable, and the special effects is quite fine. You buy the characters and you buy their problems, which often is quite rare in modern disaster films. Just the idea with the tropical fish tank cleaner is good and even if it’s not mentioned, you can almost guess that the inventor have a much bigger invention on his hands than he ever could imagine. But it’s never said out loud, which is cool.

The special effects are mostly digital but works fine. The panic scenes down in the subway is excellent and haunting, tragic and chaotic. It reminded me of the nightmares I’ve had being stuck deep down in the Estonia ferry, where there’s no chance you’ll survive. As always it’s the human tragedies who carries the disaster scenes, and as always it works. Even if I love the huge scenes of destruction in 2012 it’s so big and so impersonal it more becomes “fun” than tragic, and this movie avoids it without ruining the fun of seeing thousands of people getting killed as silly, mainstream entertainment.

252: Signal of Life is no masterpiece, but it works as a good disaster film. And that’s not bad at all!

Deathquake (Kenjirô Ohmori, 1980)

Disaster movies are about facing our fears, making us feel small in the presence of nature. They’re the ultimate horror movies, a senseless display of violence, cynicism and kills for the sake of entertaining the audience. I love it of course, in the same way I love to read true crime or watching documentaries about terrible incidents. They’re been with me since I was a kid, from Towering Inferno to - my absolute favorite - Mark Robson’s Earthquake. Somehow disaster films mixes the gay sensibilities of emotionally strong and scene chewing melodramas with the harsh reality of the world.

Kenjirô Ohmori’s Deathquake belongs the the last gasp of the original fad, which began in the early seventies and slowly faded away until a few huge fiascos around 1980. Maybe Iriwin Allen’s When Time Ran Out.. was the nail in the coffin, a very standard disaster romp with a visibly bored Paul Newman fighting a volcano. Not bad, in a way only us fans of melodrama can appreciate, but of course far from being a quality product. Kinji Fukusaku’s super-expensive international co-production Virus also gave the genre the death blow - which is a damn pity, because it’s one of the best virus thrillers ever made. Low on visual disasters but huge on human drama.

Deathquake is a lightweight product compared to The Submersion of Japan, Toho’s giant production who later was recut in the US by Roger Corman and released as Tidal Wave. The original Japanese movie is a masterpiece, one of the best disaster films ever made. A haunted, doomed tale with an interesting sense of self-reflection on the behalf of the Japanese. It evoked the atmosphere of the bomb, of war, of great human tragedies. It’s still powerful.

Deathquake on the other hand starts of pretty slow, very talky melodrama with the usual ingredients of scientists trying to make the government understand the dangers that awaits, a marriage in danger and of course a pretty big amount of characters on different places in Tokyo when the big one hits and literary destroys the whole town. I’ve seen Deathquake a couple of times over the years, but only the terribly crappy American version, dubbed and in awful public domain quality. Now I finally bought the gorgeous-looking Japanese DVD without subs, but it’s really no probably following the story - even if it’s a lot of talk the first hour.

The acting is good, with the typical “intensive” acting from some of the Japanese stars, but we all know that humans in the end is just supporing characters when the earthquake finally hits. And when it hits it hits good. Some of the footage is stock footage from earlier Toho productions, but the rest is actually really impressive mayhem, shot for this movie. There’s some fine miniatures crumbling in front of our eyes, lots of explosion, a not so good-looking tsunami and even a few splashes of blood here and there.

Like most Japanese movies, at least from the time, this is more focused on the human drama than the action, but still delivers some impressive disasters and mayhem - which make it worth watching the drama. Everything after that becomes so much more powerful afterwards. It’s actually interesting how much time is spent with the humans, something it shares with Submersion of Japan and Virus, and kinda put the effects in the background. Sometimes this can be really good - especially if the action deliver.

Not really sure how I can recommend you watching this. The Japanese DVD looks fantastic, but has no subs, and the US DVD looks SHIT, but is English-friendly. Maybe you should watch both? Just to get the idea of what’s all the talking is about!

Knowing (Alex Proyas, 2009)

This review might have a few spoilers.

Warning! Warning! I'm going completely bonkers here with something so mainstream it stopped being mainstream because so many people dislikes it. I actually kinda disliked it the first time I saw it, but after thinking about it for a year or two I sat down and watched it again - and Knowing is a quite silly - but decent - new age mumbo jumbo disaster drama and Nic Cage (shouldn't he be renamed Ridicolas Cage?)  isn't THAT bad in it. He's done better performances, but this is far from the worst. 

Something that can drive we insane is when people says a movie is unrealistic. Let me tell you a secret: it's a movie. Those are unrealistic. I consider documentaries works of fiction also, becasuse they're a story told by a filmmaker with his own agenda. Nothing wrong with that, that's awesome. But in a work of fiction you can never say it's unreal. Knowing would fit into this category in a many different ways:

1. The science buffs who probably finds thousands of problems in the story.

2. The religious community who doesn't find the concept especially attractive to their views.

3. The rest, who needs something to whine about.

In my view movie who goes a bit too far in their absurdity is extra entertaining, and Knowing dares to go a bit further - fucking religion in the ass and still embraces theories that every skeptic (like me) and scientist loaths. But one thing is for sure, it stands with its feet firmly on the ground with a very clear message against supernatural religion (as suppose to "factual religion", for example Ufololgy and simlilar crap). I mean, at least the non-supernatural believers tries to find some scientific evidence of some kind. Not matter if it's wrong ;)

Knowing beings 50 years ago when a school is preparing a time capsule. A little girl named Lucinda (yes, a reference to light aka enlightment) writes down, on a paper, a lot of numbers who makes no meaning at all. Back to now and Nicolas Cage son is the boy getting the paper after the capsule is take up during a ceremony. Nic gets obsessed by the numbers and starts finding a message in them: dates, the amount of people getting killed on that date and latitude and longitude where it will happen... and it happens, first with a spectacular plane crash that kills 81 people and then an even bigger disaster... and after that... "33"? What does that last number mean? Are Nic and his son in danger? And who are those strange, pale men trying to make contact?

Knowing is one of those bloated, ridiculous Hollywood productions that is actually very entertaining. There's not stopping here, there's not logical thinking - it's just absurd entertainment, silly science and a twist so fun and provoking to religous people, I just can't stop myself from liking it a lot. I especially like the interpretations of the christian mythology - from wheels in the sky, garden of Eden to the four horsemen of the apocalypse - and hey, isn't Lucinda just the female version of Lucifer anyway? There's not opening ending to the story, there's just one solution to what people have been worshipping all these years - and that's a brave thing. The only good thing religion can give us - according to the story - is some kind of inner peace. 

The action highlight of the movie is the plane crash, shot (it looks like that anyway) in one take, with Cage on full speeding running around trying to avoid getting hit my flying debrise and burning people. It's a glorious moment for disaster aficionados and the other two disasters that strike later on is nice also, so don't worry. What kinda bothers me with the movie is how extremely nice the movie looks. Everything looks planned like never before, the effects are sharp (but not perfect, to be honest), the twists are expected and written after the screenwriters ABC. It lacks the human touch, the grittiness, the down-to-earth atmosphere. If it had that, it would be an awesome popcorn movie. Now it's just a good, professional piece of popcorn cinema.

Why do I like it then? Well, like everyone else I like pseudo-science and I've reading Erich Von Däniken since I was a kid, but I guess it's also because I'm a bit of a doomsday-wacko myself. If I lived in America I would probably be one of those crazies living in a fortress out in the desert or deep in the forest, writing books and blogs about the end of days! 

Hey, it would at least make a living in the most doomsday-obsessed country in the world!

The Tower (Ji-hoon Kim, 2012)

It's always nice when new disaster movie release, and especially if it's from some other country than the US. In The Tower, a new South Korean blockbuster, we're introduced to all the clichés from the American 70's counterparts, but with a healthy dose of typical, happy, wonderful local acting and extremely spectacular action slash destruction. 

We all know that disaster movies are made after the same formula: a bunch of people stuck somewhere and then they die one by one. This is exactly what happens here, intercut with the heroic firemen of course! It's Christmas Eve in a 108 stories high skyscraper in Seoul (that's just a guess, the city... but I guess so) thousands of people are preparing for a nice evening of fake snow (from helicopters), performances, food and mingle with the rich and famous. But when one of the helicopters loses control and crashes into the building, setting off a deadly chain reaction of fires and explosions... well, of course: shit hits the fucking Kim. Or fan, I mean!

It's basically The Towering Inferno in South Korea. With some stuff from The Poseidon Adventure and even Earthquake. So it's nothing new at all, but the filmmakers knows thats. What they've made is a full-blown 70's disaster movie with modern technology, and the result is refreshingly entertaining and spectacular. The Koreans like some comedy, but here the comic relief just is a group of crazy Christians praying to god (and getting their wishes met in funny ways) and a few funny faces here and there from the supporting cast. Ji-hoon Kim keeps it straight and that's a wise decision. There's a lot of action and destruction, from fires and explosions to lots of water, climbing, jumping, a dangerous glass bridge going from the main tower to it's sibling, lots of elevators (including a terrible death for a dozen of victims) and of course crying and more crying.

This IS a South Korean movie. And it always needs crying.

So is there something to complain about? Well, yeah. But it's a common problem in the genre. It just exhausts itself towards the end. We've seen every kind of action, self-sacrifices, kids in danger, greedy politicans... so it just gets a bit too much. If it slowed down a bit, worked a little bit more on the human drama in-between the fire it would have earned a lot of quality. Now it's just a helluva lot of fun. 

Another thing that strikes me - and it something that might offend Americans - is the constant 9/11 references. I welcome that, it's powerful emotions, powerful images, but some might not understand the use for it. First of all, we have the twin towers, we have machines crashing into them, there's people falling from the windows and smashes to the ground and in the end there's a couple of scenes that's almost identical to the WTC towers crashing down, including the debrise and dust rolling through the surroundings, wide shots of the city with smokes coming up... it looks fantastic and I would of course do the same if I was the director. I wonder if it might hurt the distribution in the United States? 

Nah, I doubt that. Hopefully people can separate facts from fiction. This is just entertainment, and it happens to be a skyscraper on fire. Nothing else. 

Anyway, I think this is one of the best modern disaster films ever made. I'm very fond of another South Korean movie in the same genre, Haeundae, but this one delivered even more disaster for the money. An fine addition to the genre. A must the fans!

Condominium (Sidney Hayers, 1980)

Sometimes I think the sole reason for my existence in this world is to watch stuff that you out there never will take your time to watch. Because, yeah... it's more fun to talk about a three hour TV-disaster mini-series with Barbara Eden and Stuart Whitman than actually take time to see it your see it yourself, don't you agree? Yeah, I know you agree with me - but you don't dare to admit it!

Well, for years I searched for Condominium. It was aired only once, in 1980, and is one of the last rare disaster movies I've missed. Finally, last year, it showed up on the net in what looks to be a fifth generation copy. Someone recorded it in 1980 and probably put that tape in a box in the attic until some grandchild found it, decided it was cool to upload somewhere and here it is. Finally. Then it took me at least six months to see it, because a disaster soap starring Barbara Eden in terrible, terrible quality isn't something I prefer to see every day. I don't mind Barbara Eden or disaster soaps of course, but hey... the quality is outrageous!

Anyway, when the cat is out the rats dances on the tables as we say in Sweden, and tonight I took the brave chance to watch it. All three, long hours. Was it worth it? Hang on there and let's see...

At a luxery condominium by the sea all hell breaks loose when bad business suddenly makes the cost of living three times as expensive as the initial promise. A unscrupulous businessman (Stuart Whitman of course!) takes the chance to fuck around a little bit and decides to build an EXACT copy of the other building nearby. Suddenly our heroes have super-expensive apartments AND no exclusive right to the bay anymore. Life is tough for rich fuckers. So from now on, for two hours, we follow the inhabitants in the condo. From the super-rich old man with his young trophy wife wife, the middle-aged republican and his aggressive Italian wife, the hunky hero with his mentally unstable wife and of course the douchebag man with his submissive wife and a bunch of other man/wife combo's and then we see them talk and talk and talk and talk.... without knowing that a storm is coming closer! What will happen? Is the rumours true about the construction of the condo apartment complex? Will it collapse when the hurrican hits? Will they be able to finish their drinks before it's too late?!

Oh, this is one mega-soap. Believe me. And I loved every boring minute of it! There's so much soapish intrigue, so much toupés and hair extensions, shallow characters and clichéd dialogue that it's very hard not to fucking adore it! Because strangely enough it never seems that long. The pacing is fine, the actors are good and in-between all the elderly ex-stars slumming in yet another TV-productions there's a fine TV-drama. Yeah. I'm not kidding. Sure, it's silly as hell. But there's something touching with these dreamers, these innocent rich people believing this house is the sole important place in the world. It's like watching scifi. Absurd, but somehow totally believable. It even have a very unexpected lesbian twist during the last half - and the assholes get what they deserves! Like Devin Kelly wrote on Facebook today, why must there always be a drunken party just when the hurrican hits? It's the same thing in Jan Troell's 1979 fiasco The Hurricane. Why not take the bottle and pretend like nothing is happening when shit hit the fan... sounds like a good plan to me.

Yeah I know. The DISASTER. I'm coming to that now. It's of course the highlight of the show. Most of the second half is focused on the storm and the destruction. A lot of stock footage, but pretty well edited into the rest of the material (but the quality could have fooled me, everything looks like crap in the version I found!). But like all good disaster they have some excellent miniatures collapsing at the end. It's always hard to make water look okay in a miniature setting, but here it looks fine - and the final piece of destruction could have been a part of a bigger Hollywood movie from the same time. Some blood also! 

Condominium is a mini-series for us who loves and craves old-style disaster productions. I wish this could find its way to disc or download, but restored and with stellar quality. I doubt that will ever be, but stranger thing's have happen so far in our mysterious world. And remember, everything with Stuart Whitman is worth watching. 

That's a fact. 

And yeah, I put two clips up on Vine. Here they are: