By Pepper of the Daily Pepper
In the 1970s, disaster movies were all the rage: Earthquake, Flood!, Airport, Airport 1975, Airport '77, The Concorde: Airport 1979, The Poseidon Adventure, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and even Rollercoaster. That last one featured George Segal battling a terrorist who was targeting amusement parks. When the genre got too darn weird, Hollywood retired it for a little while. Disaster movies are great pop-culture entertainment in which audiences can enjoy overripe actors like Karen Black and George Kennedy rescuing the world. "If Karen Black can get that plane down on the ground," the ordinary viewer thinks, "by golly so can I!"
Disaster movies haven't exactly gone away, but the causes of the disasters were less likely (Armageddon, Deep Impact, Independence Day). Now they are back in full force with NBC's miniseries remake of The Poseidon Adventure, starring Steve Guttenberg, Rutger Hauer, and Adam Baldwin - who is apparently not one of the Baldwin brothers, but he'll have to do.
