No one ever really expects a good disaster movie – quality seems – to be antithetical to the genre, but we can at least hope that a disaster movie should be entertainingly bad. One of the classics in those terms is The Poseidon Adventure – when a ‘sub-sea earthquake’ unleashes a mountainous tidal wave on a luxury cruise liner, completely turning it over, the laughs are as torrential as the flooding water. The Poseidon Adventure, after all, offers Leslie Nielsen as the ship’s captain, doing with a straight face what he would comically perfect in the Naked Gun films. There’s also Gene Hackman as a barking, renegade priest, Ernest Borgnine as a gruff cop and poor Shelley Winters, repeatedly forced to address how overweight she is every time the escapees have to squeeze through another tight corridor.
