Tough Crowd

Good Lord what's all the fuss about! I had never seen this before and it was free on Youtube so I gave it a go. I found it genuinely entertaining for what it was. Dated elements notwithstanding I didn't think it was campy at all except in the parts that were meant to be (showing the two hookers at the end was weirdly hilarious). No, it's not a great movie but I thought it was a good, satisfying entry in the 70's disaster flick genre--I didn't think it was any worse than Earthquake and immeasurably better than most of the "Airport" movies. Of course I remember when these movies came out and standards were different then so I forgive it that, it probably isn't possible for a modern viewer to put it in context that way (and it was a flop even at the time anyway)--this looked a lot like what was on TV then in terms of too-broad acting, simplistic plots and tacky special effects but we didn't expect much more then for this kind of movie. But to judge it by anything else but what it was is pointless. It was meant to be a genre film and I was surprised it was actually not that bad for all the horrible things I'd heard about it--certainly I didn't find it a laugh-riot of bad film moments and I'm a big fan of bad movies (check out my sig), if anything it just got a little dull sometimes. It just impresses on me that audiences are fickle and once you lose them you can't get them back...someone decided to deem this the worst film ever made and the end of the disaster genre for some reason but I didn't get that from it. I've seen much, much worse (Hindenberg and Beyond The Poseideon Adventure come to mind), I think the flood sequence in the original "Superman" is a lot more embarrassing technically and I don't know that "classics" like Towering Inferno are really all that much better as films, personally. Just my 2 cents.

Nilbog! It's goblin spelled backwards! This is their kingdom!