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The
1970s in America spawned many troubling things. Stagflation,
platform shoes, pet rocks and disco music were all terrible
poxes upon the land but Hollywood boasted the most worrisome
of all ’70s plagues —
the Disaster Movie! And of course, in the wake of the huge Hollywood
success of The Poseidon Adventure
and The Towering Inferno came a
host of imitators all trying to find a different catastrophe
to work into a screenplay. Earthquakes, tidal waves, tornados,
avalanches and giant rabbits all made their way to big screens
to threaten civilization and B-list actors. It was only a matter
of time before a cyclone was deployed to entertain the masses.
Enter Mexican exploitation filmmaker René Cardona Jr.
with a script ripped from the headlines. No, wait —
that was another of his films, Guyana:
Cult of the Damned. This movie is simply another low-budget
'epic' for fans of cinema misery. Somehow I fit that description.
Three groups of people are in the Caribbean
at the wrong time. Group A is taking a short sightseeing tour
around the islands aboard a glass-bottomed boat. Group B is
a crew of professional native fishermen currently down on their
monetary luck trying hard to make a big haul. Group C is a mixed
bag of travelers and tourists flying to the islands on a chartered
plane. When a sudden cyclone sweeps in from the Atlantic all
three groups are caught far from land and suffer the consequences
(of being in a disaster film). The fishermen have to abandon
their sinking vessel for a small dinghy; the glass-bottomed
boat runs through all of its fuel just to keep from being swept
out to sea, while the plane crashes, killing most of the passengers
and crew. The rescue searches begin immediately, with relatives
and friends pushing for swift help to locate the missing. Over
the course of a few days the three groups of survivors find
each other and cluster together on the tour boat. A few fish
are pulled from the ocean for food but the limited amount of
fresh water soon becomes their main concern. Even with strict
rationing it quickly becomes clear that rescue is going to be
too late for most to live if something isn't done. When the
idea of cannibalism is finally broached it's clear that it may
be the only chance they have to survive long enough to be found.
So with the sun beating down on them, sharks circling the boat,
a baby about to be born and no help on the horizon, what will
they do?
Cyclone isn't
a terrible film, although it is fairly dull for the first hour
or so. The time spent introducing the players and setting up
the situation is routine and slow with only some nice underwater
photography to enliven things. Like most disaster films the
characters are nothing more than stereotypes sketched in just
enough to provide contrast with each other. There's the greedy
businessman, the priest, the pregnant woman, the young boy,
the stern boat captain, the over-privileged rich bitch, etc.
A few of the characters are given a little bit of depth but
not too much, as their primary purpose here is to suffer. It's
hard to care about any of these folks even if several of the
standard movie heart-tugging moments do manage to hit their
marks. (I'll give up my water for the pregnant woman!) The priest
(Arthur Kennedy) is the voice of moral guidance and has more
than enough to say in the eventual debate over eating the dead
members of the group. The pregnant couple is blandly endearing
and the owner/captain of the boat is slightly interesting but
mostly the group remains ciphers. It's only in the last 45 minutes
that the movie really comes to life with arguments and anger
finally boiling over. These scenes between people pushed to
the edge by nature make the desperate quality of events start
to feel real. Enough time is spent on the nastier points of
how these people survive to make the grittiness seem a straightforward
look at circumstances instead of just exploitation —
at least most of the time. No matter how realistic or necessary
the death of the rich woman's dog is, it's never going to feel
like anything more than a scene contrived to shock the audience.
This being a low budget affair there are
some times when the script's reach exceeds its grasp. The storm
sequence is only sporadically effective. The reality of the
cyclone is pretty shakily displayed and smartly moved past as
fast as possible to get to the focus of the tale. It can be
hard to film effective displays of raging nature without huge
amounts of money but there's no reason to complain here. They
seem to have known their limitations and covered them fairly
well (even if they lean on the stock footage a little too often).
Only the shots of the crashed and sunken airplane really sell
the sense of danger the actors are conveying. Of course the
later shark attacks are also pretty unconvincing, as it looks
like the beasts are ripping into bags of paint rather than human
flesh. Still, this is far from the worst the disaster genre
has to offer and though it certainly isn't the best, it's worth
seeing for its effective moments.
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