Rent The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

When Cruise Meets Bruise - The Poseidon Adventure review by griggs

You’ve got to hand it to The Poseidon Adventure —  few films have gone down in history quite so literally. It's the granddaddy of disaster flicks, the one that proved audiences will pay good money to watch rich people crawl through air ducts. Gene Hackman yells at God, Ernest Borgnine yells at Hackman, and Shelley Winters just swims her heart out. Half the cast are upside down, the rest are drowning in melodrama.

Ronald Neame directs like a man gleefully tip over a dollhouse, and the result is pure 1970s mayhem — sweaty, soapy, and gloriously sincere. The sets twist, the dialogue groans, and everyone looks one waterlogged close-up away from quitting show business. Yet the spectacle still holds up: all steel, sweat, and brute-force stunt work, no CGI pixels required.

It's as subtle as a foghorn but twice as entertaining. Earnest, bonkers, and weirdly moving, it's cinema's classiest shipwreck — the rare film where "going under" counts as a career high.

One Of the Best Of The Disaster Films of the 70s - The Poseidon Adventure review by GI

One of the first and the one of the best of the disaster film cycle that arrived in the 1970s. It remains an exciting survival drama with some really gritty action and a wonderful cast. Set on board the American cruise liner SS Poseidon on its last voyage through the Mediterranean where at the end it will be dismantled. The Captain (a cameo role for Leslie Nielsen) is pressured by the owners to make haste when the ship is struck by a freak wave and turns over. The passengers are all celebrating at a New Year Eve party and after the ship rolls the survivors are urged by a senior crewman to stay put and await rescue. But one of the passengers, a maverick Catholic priest Scott (Gene Hackman) insists they make their way up towards the hull. He persuades eight others to join him, including the always brilliant Ernest Borgnine and Shelly Winters as an unlikely heroine, and the film's plot is their hazardous journey through the upside down ship. It's essentially the classic mythological narrative of the hazardous journey through the labyrinth. Apart from being a tense, realistic and compelling drama it's also a story of people struggling with themselves, about religious faith, doubt and heroism. It really is one of the best films of the 70s and well worth seeking out if you've never seen it. There was a remake in 2006, Poseidon, with Kurt Russell, which is actually pretty good too but this original tops it (Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, a 1979 sequel starring Michael Caine is a bit lacklustre and can be ignored).