A Loud, Long, Explosive, Star-Studded Guide to Avalanches, Earthquakes, Floods, Meteors, Sinking Ships, Twisters, Viruses, Killer Bees, Nuclear Fallout, and Alien Attacks in the Cinema!!!!
July 31, 2006
This smart and punchy guide to movies centered on man-made, divine or natural events leading to high death tolls or mass destruction is a must have for the genre's devoted fan. The co-authors' short history of the form begins with newsreel footage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the earliest produced disaster film (the "little-seen" silent 1913 Italian film The Last Days of Pompeii) and nods to the many cheesy one-offs and contemporary mega-budget computer-animated star-packed blockbusters. The bulk of the book offers pithy and often humorous reviews of disaster films (organized by disaster type) that analyze key genre elements (such as "scenes of self-sacrifice" and "horribly gruesome and elaborate death scenes") and rates films on a five-tiered system, from "Highly Recommended" (among them, Airplane!, Mars Attacks! and both the 1953 and 2005 War of the Worlds) to "So Bad It's Good" (Firestorm, Meteor and Bug). Movie buffs should get a kick out of this.