The Posideon Adventure is the only 70's disaster movie that might be called artistically good. Airport 1975 and The Towering Inferno might be more entertaining due to their trashness, and Posideon is not an excellent movie, but it has a few ideas and parts of the film are actully rather harrowing.
You know the premise from the poster. A few seconds after midnight on New Years Eve, a tsunami hits a luxeray liner and causes it to turn upside down, killing almost all the crew. A Catholic priest (Gene Hackman) convinces a few of the passengers that there only way out is by heading to the top (bottom) of the ship, and hope for rescuers. The only people who will go with him is are the ship's cook (Roddy McDowel), a kid and his teenage sister (Eric Shea and Pamela Sue Martin), a cop and his former prostitue wife (Ernest Borgnine and Stellela Stephens), a Jewish couple trying to visit their grandson in Israel (Jack Albertson and Shelley Winters), the hysterical band singer (Carol Lynley) and a middle aged bachelor (Red Buttons). After the crash, the movie is told almost in real time as they only have a few hours to make it to the top before the ship sinks.
Although I walked in to the film expecting to laugh at it, I was surprised at how effective it is. Yes, there are a lot of cheesy moments (the kid is really annoying and Leslie Nielson's wooden performance as the captain is the kind he would parody later in his career), but there is a real sense of urgency. The all-star cast means that we don't know who is going to die (although we know there is a 100% chance the kid will live, because children never die in movies), and on a basic, maybe even instinctive level we want the characters to escape. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact the audince constantly wonders whether they would have made it out in a similer disaster. I think that I would have gone with the priest, but I probably would have slipped an fell to my death while climbing a wet, metallic ladder. Another interesting aspect is that some people are randomly killed- as in life, sometimes people die for no reason.
In a way, The Posideon Adventure works on the simplest level of all films- it simply records what an experience and what something looks like. This is not a great movie, but it's ending stayed with me a lot longer than I thought it would.
The Poseidon Adventure (1972)