Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Grindhouse Experience Chapter 7: Poseidon Explosion (1973)

The Grindhouse Experience set has been a bit different through every movie. Some quality, some garbage, some laughs, some moments of me wanting to slam my head into a wall. Poseidon Explosion is another head scratcher.

Made in 1973, its title is an attempt to cash in that doesn't fit the film at all. It makes you think cheap... rip off... throw away... Its really none of them. I expected a large boat blowing up due to some crazy heist or plot to gain money or something that isn't too far fetched in the world of cheap cinema. Instead its a dramatic thriller about a city trying to save their region from a giant ship that is on fire and filled with highly flammable and explosive cargo. The problem is that for the duration of the movie it was the same damn thing over and over. A man on the ship yelling at other men on board about the fire, then yelling to the shore about how it "could blow any minute" then some drama in the town about it.

Its honestly on repeat for the vast majority of the run time. It wasn't poorly made, in fact its one of the better made film in this set so far. Its just painful to sit through. My attention span was about 30 seconds at a time for this movie because of it's repetition. The IMDB page says it has a runtime of 112 minutes but this copy was only around 80 minutes so I don't know which is closer to actuality since IMDB has been known to be wrong but it felt like something was missing. And honestly, on this night, that wasn't a bad thing. The 80 minutes dragged on and on. It could be a case of me not being ready or in the mood for what I was getting but I had no desire to see any more.

Maybe on another day it will sit better with me but that other day will be years away.

3 comments:

Razvan said...

This was actually a movie inspired by real facts, a real ship called Poseidon did explode in 1970 near the romanian town of Galati, hence the title. No connection with the other movie and I doubt very much that the communist authorities did know about that movies! :)
It was simply what is called now a "dramatization based on real facts"

Razvan said...

BTW the original romanian version it's simply called Explozia i.e. The Explosion. I wasn't even aware that this movie was seen outside Romania! :)

Celluloid Terror (Seth Poulin) said...

Hey, sorry for the delay in responding. I always appreciate some background information on movies that I wasn't aware of, even if it is on a movie I'm not too fond of, haha. Thanks for reading and commenting!