Avalanche

I am a bit embarrassed to admit I was in this movie. A bit, but, hey I had fun filming & was paid pretty well. Actually I was several scenes. I was a student at Fort Lewis majoring in Theater. Our troupe was invited to audition to be paid extras. It was spring break & I was earning money for my upcoming wedding. Not bad pay for a college student.

The snow and cold was real. It snowed the whole time we did any outdoor scenes. A fun mess when you add shredded plastic, Styrofoam boulders, and huge wind fans.

I lived in the area for quite a while & I too find this movie funny. I love the scene when Rock Hudson walks over to a window and states when he saw that mountain he knew he had to live there. That mountain is nowhere near Durango. As for the avalanche, well lets just say it is very hard for an avalanche to travel up mountain. But this one did to start at Tammeron and end up wiping out Purgatory mountain (now known as Durango mountain). Very funny stuff if you are from the area.

In the original credits Fort Lewis College Theater Department was listed but I see we are not here. As I was the only member to stick around during th break to work on the movie I must say I am disappointed but not surprised.

One of the premieres were held in Durango. I was not as pleased with the final product as I was when we filmed. We never saw the whole script so the movie was very different from what we were told. But all in all a good time and a not as bad as it could have been film. Wish I could say I went on to better movies but I went on to be a full time mommy and wife.

If you ever lived in the area it is a fun watch. You will see bloopers in things others will never notice.

Go watch it NOW before it disappears forever! I remember watching this when I was a kid, and even then we all burst out laughing during the avalanche. This movie is absolutely hilarious- you'll laugh your head off. As a drama, I rate it a 4, but if you watch it and think of it as "Airplane!" In the Rockies, it warrants a perfect 10. It it SO unbelievably over-the-top and campy, it's hard to believe they didn't intend it that way. I'll give them a pass on the special effects, since in the late 70s this was about the best they could do, but I can't forgive Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow for appearing in this just for a paycheck. Jeanette Nolan is the best thing in this film, and Robert Forster does a good job in his role (and he's much more handsome than Rock Hudson)! Everything else is a laugh-fest.

I lived in Durango, CO when they filmed this movie. This makes it all that much funnier. You cannot take this movie seriously.

The avalanche is actually fan blown styrofoam. Half the mountains pictured in the movie, don't actually exist.

If you are a Durango resident, watch this movie for kicks. If not, don't even bother, you're better off watching the weeds grow.

This is a perfect movie for Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Hey, someone had to die of a little snow in the 70s..it was bound to happen. If whatever hack made this hadn't bothered, Irwin Allen would have..but to give credit where credit is due, Allen would have cast this better. Even if the movie stunk to high heaven (hello, 'The Swarm'), at least there were enough stars to keep you from falling asleep.

Also to give credit where it is due, there is some really beautiful cinematography, especially in outdoor shots of Mia Farrow swimming and another scene of a skier trying to outdistance an avalanche is shot very well.

However, once the cast starts talking, the groans can begin. Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow seem like they wouldn't even converse at a cocktail party; they are from different cinematic solar systems and should not have been paired here at all, even if they are a divorced couple. Robert Forster is semi-interesting as an predictable love interest for Mia and an ecologist who can predict the entire movie in his first scenes if only the screenplay had allowed him.

Impatient action fans - tune in one hour after it started to see the extras get killed. Before that is alot of drama, and after that is the rescue, and that's all, folks.

I'm an avid fan-boy of 1970's disaster movies. Not so much because they're intense and captivating since, quite frankly they're not, but actually just because they're so exaggeratedly clichéd and kitschy. You can easily summarize ALL the 70's disaster movies ever made with one and the same synopsis, only the nature of the disaster differs. It can be a fire, flood, volcanic eruption, virus, shipwreck or – like in this case – an avalanche! The main difference between this film and the majority of classic titles (such as "The Towering Inferno" and "The Poseidon Adventure") lies in the budget. Usually Irwin Allen produced this sort of stuff and he had plenty of money to spare. "Avalanche", on the other hand, is a Roger Corman production and he's mostly (in)famous for delivering cheap and extremely low-budgeted cult films. A half-decent disaster movie is simply impossible to accomplish without a bit of budget, and this clearly shows in "Avalanche". The special effects are pitiable, with whole bunches of people getting buried underneath thick and oddly shaped boulders of Styrofoam. But, aside from the budgetary restrictions, "Avalanche" does live up to four out of five essential disaster movie trademarks. #1: there needs to be at least one major star and a long list of secondary stars. Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow were big names around the time, but the supportive cast is a bit disappointing. I assume that Roger Corman spent all his actors' budget on the aforementioned two names and Robert Forster. #2: The characters are usually split into two camps with completely opposite ideals and/or initiatives. Why, yes! Although the "righteous" camp is extremely small this time. Rock Hudson is the owner of a fancy winter sport resort in Colorado and he keeps on expanding the area to lure more tourists. Robert Forster is the tree-hugging reporter who endlessly warns him that the expansion needs to stop otherwise there will be avalanches. #3: regardless what type of disaster we're dealing with, variants of the exact same perilous situations are always applicable. Too true, we have people that are buried alive, trapped in ski lifts, crushed or dead in gas explosions. #4: always remember that, when the situation appears to be at it worst, it can and will still get even worse! That's another true cliché of the disaster film! In "Avalanche", for example, there's a sequence in which an ambulance transporting people who narrowly escaped dead already, crashes into a ravine! Only for die-hard disaster movie fanatics.