Too much of everything

Awesome Movie

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

A dam bursts and floods the small Oregon town of Brownsville. Director Earl Bellamy, working from a tight script by Don Ingalls, keeps the engrossing story moving along at a steady pace, takes time to develop the characters, builds a good deal of tension, and pulls out the thrilling stops for the exciting and eventful last third. The sound acting by the capable cast keeps this picture humming: Robert Culp as cynical, yet heroic helicopter pilot Steve Brannigan, Martin Milner as the no-nonsense Paul Burke, Richard Basehart as the stubborn and unscrupulous mayor John Cutler, Barbara Hershey as perky nurse Mary Cutler, Cameron Mitchell as the harried Sam Adams, Francine York as the sweet Daisy Kempel, and Whit Bissell as the stalwart Dr. Ted Horne. Carol Lynley really makes a deliciously hammy meal out of her thankless pregnant woman in peril part. However, Roddy McDowall is wasted in a nothing bit role as whiny tourist Mr. Franklin. Rich LaSalle's robust score hits the rousing spot. Lamar Boren's slick cinematography provides a neat polished look. A fun flick.

****SPOILERS****One of the least known Irvin Allen disaster flicks of the 1970's with the usual all star cast but, with an only 2.5 million budget, below par-for Allen-special effects makes its point that you can't mess around with Mother Nature and end up getting away with it. That's the cold or wet hard truth that Brownsville mayor John Cutler, Richard Basehart, finds out when he thinks he can keep the truth about an engineers report about the town dam being defected and about to burst! It's Brownsville top dam mechanic Paul Burke, Martin Milner, who smells a rat in all this and tries to get the people of Brownsville and its surroundings to get the hell out before the dam bursts and they end up under water!The dam's supervisor Sam Adams, Cameron Mitchell, at first goes along with Mayor Cutler's idiotic demands, like the little Dutch boy holding off the Atlantic Ocean with his finger in the dike, to keep the water from overflowing but later realizing that he's both mad and delusional tries to relieve the water pressure only to get swept up with the action or rushing waters. As for Sam's very pregnant wife Abbie played by a previous survivor of an Irvin Allen disaster movie "The Poseidan Adventure" the lovely Carol Lynley is stuck in her house and about to give birth at any moment!***SPOILERS*** With Mayor Cutler now a total mental case, in how bad he screwed things up, it's up to Burke and helicopter pilot Steve Brannigan, Robert Culp, to save the day and the town of Brownsville from going under. With time running out and the water levels from the burst dam rising they not only have to work against the clock to detonate the remaining dam structure to alleviate the water pressure by draining it out but also save Mayor Cutler's son Andy, Eric Olsen,from it engulfing him and everyone still left alive in town! The rest of the cast has Barbara Hershey as Mayor Cutler's daughter and Paul Burke's girlfriend. It's Mary who's also a nurse in the local hospital. There's also Mary's mom and Cutler's wife Alice, Teresa Wright, who tragically doesn't survive the flood by her trying to rescue her son Andy who in fact, in all the confusion, she mistook for someone else.And last but not least in a cameo role Roddy McDowall as, what I think, naturalist Mr. Franklin who after less then three minutes of screen time completely disappears, like a puff of smoke, from off the face of the earth!

Earl Bellamy directed this TV movie produced by Irwin Allen that stars Robert Culp as a helicopter pilot who becomes involved in the plight of the town of Brownsville, which is in a state of alarm because heavy rains have caused the nearby dam to overflow, and threaten to destroy it all together. Martin Milner plays the man trying to warn the stubborn mayor(played by Richard Basehart) about the threat, but he doesn't want to hear it, which will lead to disaster for all... Cameron Mitchel, Carol Lynley, Barbara Hershey and Teresa Wright costar. Disappointing film is a big build-up to very little, and contains a talky story that generates little interest, though the good cast tries.

Well, I recently got a hold of a used VHS tape, very cheap, with 2 disaster-of-nature flicks on it. I stumbled upon them on a flea-market and just took it home because of the cool cover-art (paintings of water/fire-disasters, not shown here on IMDb). So I sat down this afternoon and watched the first one on the tape, FLOOD! And I can say right away that the most exciting thing about this movie indeed was... the cover-art! And, yes, I know this is a 1976 made-for-TV movie, but still I expected quite a lot more from it and I feel like the film-makers could have done a lot better. The first 45 minutes of the movie are just too tedious. Sure, a lot of different characters are introduced, but they say or do nothing interesting at all. And what's even worse: Roddy Mcdowall's character gets introduced during the first scenes (apparantly he's a wealthy tourist on a fishing holiday), and after that, he never re-appears in the movie! The other main characters, basically just couples (husbands & wives and soon-to-be-married folks) have nothing else to do than to basically grab every opportunity to say "I love you" to one and other (over the phone, while meeting in a hospital,...). And naturally, there's this Brannigan-character (played by Robert Culp) running around warning everybody about the dam that's about to break, and of course nobody, especially the mayor (what did you expect?), believes him. I got somewhat excited when Barbara Hershey's name came up on the opening credits, but boy, did she portray one of the most disappointing female characters of the movie! And when the dam finally breaks, it's just pretty pathetic. All you see, is some sort of wall of mud crumbling down. It doesn't even look like a dam. The one thing I really hoped for, was seeing some well-crafted miniatures of town-buildings getting flooded with river water. But nope. Nothing like that at all. One or two shots have some water running through a street (with easy-to-figure-out not-so-special-effects), some living rooms with water in them and a kid floating in a river holding on to a tree. And on top of that, we get several stock footage of real floods (mostly air-shots) which poorly match the main look of the film.So, this really is a rather uneventful film, and the only thing you can say about it is that it's not particularly badly made and features OK acting. It's one of those movies you just might end up watching when it comes up on TV while you're 'zapping' channels and have absolutely nothing else to do. On the other hand, you might also keep on changing channels.I suppose there are fans of disaster-movies out there, and they just might dig FLOOD! on some levels. I just got nothing out of it. I sure hope the other movie (FIRE!) on the tape is better.