Beyond The Poseidon Adventure [1979] [Dutch Import]

Like the fist film this one starts with the action fast so there is no waiting around. It is set just after the first film ended with Michael Caine and his crew (including Carl Malden)stumbling across the Poisiedon with the intent to salvage the loot onboard. all is fine until another crew turn up (Headed by the ever slimly Terry Sevallis) claiming they are for medical aid for any survivors. And once again we are pulled into the hellish bowels of the wreck. Terry Sevallis and his crew's real recovery mission comes clear and Michaels Caine's salvage crew must become the saviours of the survivors they find in a race against time before the ship itself goes beneath the waves... This film is quite reasonable with a typical daft cash-in story line with none of the deep meaning of the first. The actors do well and Michael Caine gives us a standard wooden hero. The effects Ok, with the tidal wave scene stolen from the first film and the sets are good but a bit to "clean". This makes you feel as if you're on a different ship from the fist film which is a bit of a let down. All and all it's a not bad film that carries well with the occasional daft scene and cliche but worth a watch if you enjoyed "The Posiedon Adventure".

"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. The 2.35:1 widescreen transfer is good.

Some spoilers perhaps!

Since the original Poseidon Adventure raked in so much dough, Irwin Allen wanted to get a sequel off the ground right away. It would eventually take him 7 years to get it made and in that space of time it would go through many changes.

To begin with, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure was to star Borgnine, Buttons and the rest of the survivors. After being rescued by the French Coast Guard they were to be transported to safety by train through the French Alps. A tunnel cave-in was to trap them all over again amid other, more sinister, drama.

That idea was soon squashed. Hackman didn't want to return (as Reverend Scott's brother!) and even though poster art was created (you can still find the train/gun image out there), that's about as far as production got. Allen focused on making other movies for the time being. Then, in 1978 he asked Paul Gallico to write a sequel. Gallico obliged but died before Beyond was published. His novel had Rogo, Martin and Manny Rosen being forced at gunpoint to return to the ship to plunder its secret cargo. Bandits, pirates, double-crosses and macabre plot developments followed.

Unable to convince Borgnine and the others to return at this point, Allen changed the story to accommodate a bunch of new characters. This Mike Rogo became Mike Turner (Michael Caine) and Bandits and Pirates became Stefan Svevo (Television Savalas) and his group of terrorists.

Beginning just before the storm in which the Poseidon capsized, Turner and his crew (Sally Field and Karl Malden) are out in Jenny the Tugboat. Turner loses his cargo and worries about the bank taking his precious boat away. New Years Day arrives and the sea is calm once again. Turner sees the French Coast Guard chopper buzzing overhead and figures there must be something interesting over the horizon.

Interesting indeed. An abandoned 5-star, world-class super-liner designed to carry hundreds of wealthy passengers. There's sure to be riches to plunder and a quick trip down to the Purser's Office (the idiot who chose to die in the first) might save Jenny from the banks greedy hands.

'Doctor' Stefan Svevo (trying saying that while drunk) and his group of suspicious men dressed in impeccably white clothes follow Turner inside, hoping to save some remaining survivors. Yeah right! Svevo just happens to be after a secret cargo of guns and plutonium and has an agent still stuck on-board.

Turner and his crew find the Purser's safe quite easy and load up on the loot. But they also find a bunch of stranded passengers including a very young-looking Peter Boyle, Slim Pickens, Mark Harmon and Jack Warden as a blind writer. His quick trip to pinch the riches turns into the much more noble task of leading the rest to safety. But once they discover Svevo's plot a fight breaks out.

I think that BTPA has had an unfair amount of criticism. Until the 2006 DVD release the film suffered 27 years of pan and scan TV screenings and videos, which completely screws up the scope photography. Seeing the film in widescreen, as intended, gives it a much slicker look. But I wasn't too impressed with the set-decoration and lighting. The Poseidon was already trashed and unstable before the first survivors escaped. By now it should be seriously threatening to sink or explode and the sets should reflect how much stress the ship is under. But they do look too spotless and the lighting is too bright and un-atmospheric. And, just so you know, a ship of this size would have more than one kitchen. So moans about it 'already being flooded' are invalid.

And I do think that the ending is kind of abrupt and rushed. It was a bit of a let-down having finish with such a lame, flippant finale. And, despite, previous criticisms, I do think that the characters are just as good as before. I felt sorry for Jack Warden when his wife died, or when Michael Caine realised that he lost the gold. Wilbur (Karl Malden) was a good character too and I think that his exit from the film was less than what he deserved. There is also more continuity with the original than the negative reviews proclaim. So don't let that put you off.

It's had a bad reputation, but BTPA isn't as bad as pretentious movie zealots would have you think. If you are a fan of the original then it is at least worth a rental.

The DVD features a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen picture with Dolby Mono sound (a bit of a downer since the first was in 6-Track Surround). It also contains a vintage a TV featurette running about 30 minutes and a couple of trailers.