Mas allá del Poseidón

Sequel to The Poseidon Adventure.

Every Single Cast Member Is Outstanding. How often can one say that about a Disaster movie, or any movie?

I have watched the 1979 film about 25 times on video. The way the characters/actors react to each other and the very memorable lines they come out with are all wonderful. Sally Field brings incredible humour to simple every day terms like, "Oh brother", or "are you going to kiss me now?", and despite her public comments on how much she hated the movie and disliked Irwin Allen, this stands out as the best of Sally Field, to me.

Michael Caine recently said on a British talk show that, "Irwin Allen's The Swarm was the worst movie I have done". So I guess Beyond/Poseidon is not too high on his list. I don't care. The way his character takes command of this disaster movie and his encounters with Telly Savalas (this was also my favourite Savalas show) and Sally Field are nothing short of great entertainment.

I could do another 20 quotes from the other players. This movie had an okay musical score which picked up in the end credits.

Note: 25 minutes was edited out and I have seen all the deleted footage. A lot of it concerned a tedious subplot with the blind guy and there was a bad effects scene of the Poseidon on the surface. I walked away from the 25 minutes saying - I am so glad they cut this stuff out!

Great movie!

This horrifyingly bad and automatically inferior sequel to "The Poseidon Adventure" came and went in theaters so quickly that one could be forgiven for not even realizing that it ever existed! The real victim here was Paul Gallico, the author of the original story. When "PA" was made into a film, the writers changed several things around (as often happens). When plans of a sequel came about, Gallico wrote the sequel to the novel based NOT on his own great little book, but on the FILM's storyline. Then the filmmakers discarded his novel "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure" and went with the version found here. So he adjusted his characters and story to fit Hollywood's version, only to have it abandoned in favor of this rehash. In it, two disparate groups join up to either salvage loot from the overturned vessel or rescue any leftover survivors. Instantly they are trapped as the boat belches and rocks continuously, yet they stay inside to find salvage, linger over conversations with newly discovered passengers and finally run around shooting at each other! The inexplicable cleanliness of the sets and utter illogic of the storyline pale in comparison to the hilariously bad dialogue and the banal music score. Previous, greater disaster movies had majestic scores done by excellent composers. This music has no memorable opening theme and features inappropriate and discordant music during scenes (often a whimsical "Flight of the Bumblebee" type of thing is heard.) Some of the dialogue has to be heard to be believed. One classic scene is when Knight dislocates her shoulder after grappling to save her blind husband Warden. Award-magnet Knight does a terrific job of displaying her injury and is carried over to a corner and revived realistically with smelling salts. Then purportedly-kind nurse Jones reveals an utter lack of bedside manner. Does she resort to the standard "You'll only feel a slight prick" or "This won't hurt a bit"??? Nooooo She grabs Ms. Knight's arm and goes, "This is going to hurt a great deal Mrs. Meredith, I'm so sorry!" Apparently, the violence of this scene was so intense that it had to be filmed through debris (fully obscuring Jones' face!) so as not to shock the audience! The characters are unwaveringly pathetic and annoying (and in many cases, just thinly disguised versions of folks from the original film.) Boyle is mercilessly loud and obnoxious, taking Ernest Borgnine's "type" to a new level of irritation. Cartwright is a little old to be playing the little girl sort of role that Pamela Sue Martin already did. Her costume makes her look like a frump. Pickens is hilarious, drawling out lines like, "Who's Svevo? As a matter of fact, who's Suzanne?" in a thick Texas accent. Jones' character is a drippy nurse and has to dredge up her own long-ago award just like Shelley Winters' swimming medal, to no good effect. Warden and Malden vie for audience sympathy with their afflictions, but don't get any. Field rubs immediate tarnish on her Oscar for "Norma Rae" with her over-the-top, "Three's Company" - level comedic attempts and Caine should have known better, but this was his period of making bomb after bomb. Still, it's fun on a camp level to watch once and future Oscar-winners slumming badly. Hamel, for the brief time she is on screen, is both alluring and amusing. Sadly, this and "When Time Ran Out" would slam the lid on any hopes of a film career, but she rebounded on television. Knight adds some much needed class, desperately trying to underact and say her lines with dignity amidst all the squalid overacting and preposterous situations. She is done no favors for this. Sadly, the old VHS and now the newly released DVD shear 8 minutes off the film's running time, cutting a lot of Warden, Knight and Jones' scenes, even removing the fact that Warden and Knight are authors! These were sentimental moments between all three and must have been spliced out in order to keep the action, such as it is, moving. It's a pointless, grave-robbing hack job intended to wring more money out of the classic original, but which sank like a stone at the box office. At least now it can be enjoyed for the audacious mess that it is!

"Beyond the Poseidon Adventure" is Irwin Allen's follow-up to his excellent 1972 box office smash "The Poseidon Adventure". However, this one doesn't come close to matching the danger and excitement of the original. In fact, I found myself laughing most of the time at the absurdity of it all. Michael Caine reteamed with Allen after "The Swarm" for this soggy sequel about two salvage crews (one good, one bad) that race each other to probe the upside-down wreck of the luxury liner Poseidon, which as you'd recall got turned over by a 90-foot tidal wave in the first film. The usual all-star cast is here, but this time around a brand new cast comes on board. Most of them make total fools of themselves. Caine takes over for Gene Hackman as the one who barks orders at everyone (instead of a reverend, Caine plays a tugboat captain). Sally Field embarrasses herself as Caine's sidekick (Field has said that this is the worst movie she's ever made and on the basis of her performance here, she's right). Peter Boyle (TV's "Everybody Loves Raymond") has the Ernest Borgnine role as the one who's yelling and complaining all the time (no, he doesn't reprise Borgnine's role from the first film). Telly Savalas looks silly as the doctor who actually has an agenda of his own. Slim Pickens has the goofiest role in the film as an alcoholic Texan who spends the entire movie holding a bottle of wine. Karl Malden, Jack Warden, and the two Shirleys (Knight and Jones) have the only good roles in the film. These roles should have been put into a better, different movie. There are two actors who star in "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure" in early roles before they hit it big on television: Veronica Hamel is in this film a few years before she was cast on the great TV show "Hill Street Blues" (she also appeared in Allen's next film: "When Time Ran Out"), and so is Mark Harmon (before "St. Elsewhere"). Now I'll grant you there are some good scenes in this film, but not enough of them. So take my advice: stick with the original film. You'll be glad you did.

** (out of four)

If you liked the original "Poseidon Adventure" then you can not find one redeeming feature of this lamebrained "sequel" that represents exploitation for a quick buck at it's worst. Paul Gallico's novel, while not stellar, at least brought back Rogo, Martin and Manny Rosen while this time out the orignal cast and characters is gone completely apart from an obscure reference to the helicopter that picks them up.

I won't bother dissecting the horrible performances by the actors in their uninteresting roles. I would like to gleefully note the absurdities of the entire plot when compared to it's predecessor. As two others have noted, it is impossible to believe that there could be no other rescue ships out to the scene at this point. And did anyone else notice how the ship seems strangely much more intact than it did in the original? Fred Koenekamp's cinematography in the original was dark, grimy, realistic and effective. This time out, this search crew ends up back in a spotless looking kitchen which in the original was devastated by a flash fire and then submerged only moments later! The photography is much too bright, the settings too spotless, and the story just plain stupid. The bigger mystery is why, after being humiliated in "The Swarm" did Michael Cain ever agree to work with Allen again?

Pretend this film never happened and just stick to the original, which is far more intelligent.

it took awhile for me to get into this movie.but somewhere along the line,i actually started to enjoy myself.once you get around the wafer thin plot,it's not half bad.the trick with this movie is to not take it too seriously.for instance,as soon as the bad guys show up,you know they're bad long before they reveal their intentions.the only other thing they could have done to telegraph they were bad would have been to have been for them each to have a neon sign over their heads saying villain.it's that absurd.and there's some cringe worthy dialogue.however,the are some very witty one liners mostly courtesy of Sally Field,and their was an interesting,and(mostly)likable mix of characters.there were actually even a few exciting moments.of course,there are endless explosions.this movie doesn't hold a candle to the original Poseidon Adventure.it was actually fairly pointless,when you think about.but it was fun,and actually quite entertaining.for me,Beyond the Poseidon adventure is a solid 5/10