On May 25th, 1977, a new blockbuster film opened that would shatter box office records, capture the imaginations of millions and go on to revolutionize the film industry. Unlike the previous few years, that movie was in no way, shape or form a disaster film. Instead, it was a science-fiction/fantasy epic entitled Star Wars, and it signaled the death knell for the once-dominant disaster trend. Films like Airport, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, which had once thrilled audiences with their spectacle, now seemed less interesting when compared to George Lucas’ whiz-bang special effects and pulp fantasy heroes. While Star Wars’ popularity was no doubt a factor in eclipsing the disaster film, there’s no question that the genre itself was running out of steam. Some productions sought to keep the genre alive by grafting disaster elements onto other genres, yet the biggest sign of doom would come from the filmmaker who’d arguably kicked off the trend proper, Irwin Allen. 

Before Star Wars opened and the disaster trend took that steep downward curve, Airport ’77 was released as an attempt by the genre’s pioneering franchise to take the mantle of premier disaster fare back from Allen. Producer Jennings Lang engineered this third installment of the Airport series from the ground up as an Allen topper: a collection of high society revelers and blue collar workers taking an entrepreneur’s snazzy new 747 for its maiden voyage are waylaid by a group of hijackers who accidentally crash the plane in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle. As the plane sinks, the Navy enacts their search and rescue operations while the plane’s captain (played by Jack Lemmon) attempts to reach the ocean’s surface to signal for help. It’s a fairly blatant mash-up of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, with Lang even making sure the Navy is credited with performing their actual rescue maneuvers on screen, just as Allen had dedicated The Towering Inferno to firefighters. Director Jerry Jameson puts together a de rigueur stacked cast, featuring just about everyone who hadn’t been in an Airport movie yet, including Christopher Lee, Darren McGavin and Lee Grant, the latter playing a hysterical woman in need of rough calming down — another element of the series used later for Airplane! In addition to attempting to best Allen’s greatest hits (which the film never does, of course), Lang and his writers graft a crime story/heist movie onto the beginning of the film, a subplot that is quickly dropped once the plane is in the water. This addition is indicative of the notion that the disaster film could no longer stand on its own — other genre elements needed to be thrown into the mix to keep escalating the stakes and piquing audience interest. 

More by Bill Bria: The Disaster Area: From ‘Airport’ to ‘Airplane!’ – Part One

That explains why two of 1977’s most prominent disaster films are not, at their core, actual disaster films. Rollercoaster, another Lang production, was the third Universal movie to be released in their Sensurround system that had premiered with Earthquake, and the studio advertised the film in much the same manner as that movie, promising thrills and spills. Those promises are fulfilled early on when a mad bomber (Timothy Bottoms) rigs a rollercoaster to explode while in operation, causing deadly chaos as a result. Yet the rest of the movie involves George Segal’s safety inspector on the bomber’s trail, making the film into a Hitchcockian cat-and-mouse thriller. Lang had hired writers Richard Levinson and William Link to pen the final script, and the duo’s success with their Colombo series shines through in the movie, making it more of a procedural noir with disaster trappings. Damnation Alley, on the other hand, is a post-apocalyptic/sci-fi film that’s structured like a disaster movie. Rather than adapting Roger Zelazny’s source novel faithfully (which has an Escape from New York-esque plot about a convict forced to traverse the titular wasteland to transport medical supplies), writers Alan Sharp and Lukas Heller instead tell the story of a small group of survivors journeying toward hoped-for safety after the Earth is nuked. The disaster elements of the picture are seen in how the group survives one new obstacle after another, in much the same way the heroes of the classic disaster films overcome problems on their road to salvation. Given the lackluster quality of its hastily assembled special effects (which studio 20th Century Fox at first believed had the edge on Star Wars), its episodic “road movie” storyline, and its ensemble of TV-ready actors (including Jan-Michael Vincent and George Peppard), Damnation Alley feels like it would’ve been better suited as a television series; director Jack Smight certainly had a good deal of experience in that medium. Instead, he’s in his Airport 1975 mode, and while Damnation makes for a decent disaster film, it’s fairly lousy sci-fi, a post-apocalyptic movie that ends with the nuclear apocalypse simply reversing all by itself.

Perhaps these mash-ups of other genres with disaster elements is what caused producer Roger Corman to finally toss his hat into the disaster ring. After all, by the end of the decade, the disaster film was just about the only popular film genre Corman hadn’t yet exploited through his New World Pictures studio. Thus, when CBS promised Corman a cool $2 million advance for making a disaster movie they could eventually show on their network involving an avalanche, he made, well, Avalanche . The low budget 1978 production (compared to other disaster films) unfortunately couldn’t afford a cavalcade of stars (just Rock Hudson, Mia Farrow and a cadre of character actors) nor a decent effects team (the cascading snow effects first turned out looking red). The film was helmed by Corey Allen, yet another TV journeyman, who struggles to keep the pace up while getting the geography of characters straight. All of this ads up to a pretty disappointing entry in the genre, one that gained some notoriety in 2017 thanks to being included as part of Netflix’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 revival. While a Corman production can be counted on for entertainment value via exploitative camp, which Avalanche certainly has in abundance, its relative failure was an early sign that the genre was on its last legs, unable to be easily perpetuated by enterprising low-budget filmmakers. 

More by Bill Bria: Review: Christian Sparkes’ ‘Hammer’

The real canary in the coal mine for the disaster film would come courtesy of the producer who really put the genre on the map, the aforementioned Allen. After the success of The Towering Inferno — which, like The Poseidon Adventure, Allen produced and co-directed — the filmmaker’s follow up was delayed, as he was lured away from his prior home at Fox by Warner Bros., who promised Allen what Fox wouldn’t: the directing chair, all to himself. Finally given the total control he’d desired for years, Allen and most of his regular team from The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure (including screenwriter Stirling Silliphant) set about making a new star-studded adaptation of another disaster-tinged novel in 1978, one by Arthur Herzog entitled The Swarm, concerning killer bees making their way to North America. However, instead of topping prior work as he had hoped to, the “Master of Disaster” made a flat-out disaster himself, a horribly inept epic that is one of the most bafflingly bad movies ever shot. Its bizarre approach may have been Allen attempting to mutate the disaster genre and keep up with the times, as the film’s force of destruction is not a natural element but rather a living creature. Yet Allen refused to lean into the horror movie aspects of a story about killer bees, attempting to avoid competing with Jaws and the wave of “animal attack” films that followed it. As a result, the killer bees are a threat insofar as the human authorities fail over and over again at stopping them, a beat that quickly becomes tiresome as Allen and Silliphant ramp up the latent pessimism and contempt for audience sympathy that had made for enjoyably dark moments in their prior disaster films. There’s no solid structure to the plot, there are barely any characters to root for (poor Michael Caine, as the film’s lead, is reduced to shouting half his dialogue in a desperate attempt to elicit emotion), and there are a plethora of inexplicable subplots and concepts (such as the bee’s poison causing hallucinations of… giant man-sized bees) that lead absolutely nowhere. The Swarm is a much better candidate than Avalanche for MST3K-style riffing, were it not two-and-a-half hours long (Warner cut the movie down to just two hours for its theatrical release, but that version hasn’t been available for years). The Swarm isn’t merely a let-down from a filmmaker who made two classic disaster films in a row, it’s a train wreck (complete with an actual on-screen train wreck) on par with 2019’s Cats. 

More by Bill Bria: The Disaster Area: From ‘Airport’ to ‘Airplane!’ – Part Two

While The Swarm’s critical and commercial failure signaled an irreversible downturn in the disaster movie’s popularity, its unintentional hilarity unwittingly prophesied where the genre was about to go. In the late 70s, the influence of Lucas and Spielberg was already beginning to change blockbuster filmmaking, with studios producing big-budget movies that leaned toward the more fantastical. Such approaches made the disaster film seem almost quaint by comparison — one of 1978’s big hits was Superman: The Movie, a film that not only starts with an earthquake (that destroys an entire planet, no less), but finishes with the Man of Steel stopping several more earthquakes single-handedly, making what once was the focus of an entire film a mere featured set-piece. As the decade drew to a close and the disaster film began to be eclipsed by sci-fi epics and the birth of the comic book superhero movie, the style of the disaster genre began to be looked on as old-fashioned and out of date, with the last few honest efforts bearing out that view. A decent parody of the genre had been made during the height of the trend’s popularity, but the one that would stick was about to be made by a filmmaking trio from Wisconsin, none of whom were named Shirley.