Are there any fans of old disaster and horror movies like Airport, Earthquake, Poseidon, It, Cujo.... etc. Heroes were George Kennedy, Charlton Heston, Gene Hackman, Steve McQueen.... Some of the movies have remakes with improved special effects - but often they lack the charm of their predecessors. On the other hand: just watched the remakes of Carrie and It - not as bad as I feared.... But: only Tim Curry is Pennywise for me.... What's your favorite old movie?
I'd have to say Zero Hour!. An airplane's flight crew all become sick from eating tainted food and one of the passengers has to land the plane. Sound familiar? It's because Airplane!, one of the greatest comedies of all time, is based on it. And not just that, something like half the dialogue in ZH is used, word for word, in Airplane!. Even a lot of the character names are the same. It's almost eerie. (the reason the writers of Airplane! got away with this, is that they actually bought the rights to ZH so they could do whatever they wanted with it.)
I watched Silver Streak last night in honor of Fred Willard 's passing (It's the only one I have with him in it), and what impressed me was the runaway train sequence at the end. That's really Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor and Patrick McGoohan hanging off the side of the train; no blue/green screen work there. Then to have the train crash into the station. I'm sure there's some miniature work involved, but a lot of that was done in camera with people dodging debris. The coordination and timing involved; you just don't see that anymore. The next best example I can think of is the 'Mad Max' films. Listen to the commentaries and watch the behind the scenes features. Again, all the stunts were done in camera; and, except in the case of 'Fury Road' where the digitally removed the harness and wires, done in real time. If you watch the original 'Mad Max' with the pop up trivia on, it mentions that George Miller didn't know about undercranking when he made the film, which would make a slow vehicle look like it's going faster than it really is; so every time you catch a glimpse of a speedometer, that's really how fast they're going. Another thing I found out watching the 'Fury Road' features is that George Miller brought back the stuntman who performed the first stunt in 'Mad Max' and gave him the honor of performing the last stunt in 'Fury Road'.
More disaster than horror for me. I've seen "Poseidon Adventure" and more recently "The Towering Inferno". When I was younger I'd catch the odd natural horror film on tv, including "The Swarm". There's also the disaster films that get uncomfortably realistic, in part because they're based on actual events. "The Impossible" and "Alive" are the first that come to mind.
When Silver Streak was in pre-production, they looked at the cost for doing the train crash scene and determined that it would be cheaper to do it full scale.
Towering Inferno is my favorite — because of the cool factor of Newman and McQueen together in the same film, but also because the disaster in that film isn't the fire, the disaster is us. Greed and hubris caused that fire as much as bad wiring.
My favourite old movies aren’t disaster movies, they’re usually comedies like ‘It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World’ or ‘Some like it Hot’. As a point of principle I’m not a fan of ‘versions’ whether it be music or film so I tend towards the source even if it’s a bit rough around the edges like The Omega man/Legend, The Poseidon Adventure/Poseidon or even Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory/Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
I'm pretty sure that at least with the latter two cases you cited, most people would agree that the former was preferable to the latter.
While I like The Towering Inferno, It always felt like a copy cat, with lesser performances, trying to land a hit in the vein of The Poseidon Adventure which is a far superior film, despite a really confusing name. A disaster like that I'd hardly consider adventurous lol. There is just lightning in a bottle with Poseidon. Something about that cast & their commitment really engages audiences. Hackman Borgnine, Albertson & Winters, even Red Buttons. They just suck you in. I can never not watch it when I see it. The others don't pull me in nearly as well If you're going older, then I'm a big fan of the original Flight of the Phoenix. It's actually arguable that it's more a survival movie than a disaster movie, but it's all kind of the same thing to me, & I'm much fonder of survival ones. I loved the hell out of The Martian.