Disaster Movie Review - Avalanche

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1978 - spoiler alerts One of the most atrociously laughable disaster movies ever made, and not surprisingly a box office disaster making it a disaster movie in a more literal sense than its makers intended. Disaster movies were all the rage in the late 70's, thanks to Irwin Allen's Towering Inferno. The formula was to have big name Hollywood cast members struggling against fire, flood, ship-wreck, crashing or hi-jacked aircraft, etc. The budgets were torn between paying A-list cast members and the special effects needed to bring the disaster scenarios to life. Avalanche gives its whole story away in the title with most of the avalanche imagery just being stock footage, with polystyrene in the close up scenes. The cast included Mia Farrow and Rock Hudson. He is the owner of a ski-resort, ignoring safety warnings about the danger of avalanches and therefore the very cause of the disaster he then heroically saves various cast members from while others perish. Footage from the movie was used later in another doomed disaster movie, Meteor. Some planes and fire-rescue trucks crash and burn for no real apparent reason, and the whole thing is woodenly acted and scripted throughout. It was among movies given the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment in 2017. Arthur Chappell