POSEIDON (2006)

You know the story: boat, wave, upside down, survivors struggle to escape.  I can't really remember anybody begging for yet another Poseidon movie, but they made it anyway.  This time around Kurt Russell is the main guy leading the survivors to safety.  He's alright, but really the script is so bland, the role could have been played by about anybody. 

Brief character introductions, wave crashes, boat flips, survivors argue and some set off to the bottom of the boat to get out through a hole, along the way they run into all kinds of stuff: water, fire, tight spaces, dated CGI, underwater swimming, blah, blah, blah. I, with my gigantic brain, could come up with an fresh, entertaining take on the old Poseidon story, but this soulless remake, while it isn't bad, is just too much like the original film to be enjoyable.  Worth watching for all the explosions and Emily Rossum's cleavage but that's about it.  I'll never watch it again even if I live to be 1,500 years old.

Part 1 The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
Part 2 - Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979)
Remake 1 - The Poseidon Adventure (2005)

THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (2005)

One of the thing that women find most attractive about me is my ability to watch horrible movies.  "Ohh, did you see the way he watched SCARECROW SLAYER?!" they say bubbling over with unbridled lust.  "I once heard he watched AX'EM twice!!!" they think to themselves as they masturbate urgently in the shower.  Yes, I am one of the few people on the planet to watch ZOMBABIES without resorting to burning down their house and somehow even even finished SLIMED without punching my cat in his cute little furry face, but even my supermacho shitty movie tolerance skills were put to the test by this 174 minute TV remake of THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE.

First off not only does the movie look like total shit, but it also has a bunch of unneeded stuff about the terrorists planning and acting out the bombing onboard the Poseidon that leads to it for whatever reason flipping over instead of just sinking.  It's all very cheap looking and the story padded out so much that the pain is almost insufferable.  I did somehow found the strength inside of me to trudge threw it, but it wasn't easy and I regretted doing so the entire time.  When I'm laying on my death bed, I'll probably be willing to give anything for another 174 minutes of life and here I am now just throwing it away.  So let my wasteful suffering be a warning to you: don't watch this movie ever!  Instead do something productive with that 174 minutes like asking that hot chick/dude/dudechick/chickdude out on a date or reading a book or curing cancer or masturbating in the shower.

Part 1 - The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
Part 2 - Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979)
Remake 2 - Poseidon (2006)

BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1979)

Seven years after the original THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, somebody thought it would be a good idea to make a sequel.  Somebody was wrong. 

Starting out right where the original film ends, BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE features boat dude Michael Caine and his crew (Karl Malden and Sally Field) showing up right as the helicopter from the first film is leaves.  They decide to go in through the hole and steal whatever they can.  How honorable.  At the same time, Telly Savalas shows up posing as a doctor and he and his men also go in to steal some stuff also.  The two groups of thieves have different shopping lists though, Caine just wants gold, jewelry and money whereas Telly wants...wait for it...plutonium.  That's right there's a secret shipment of plutonium onboard the Poseidon.  Somebody actually gets paid real money to write this stuff? 

So the question is: does the "adventure" portion of BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE outweigh the ridiculous story?  Hell no.  The action scenes are unoriginal, the acting is horrible, the sets look just like sets, the dialogue (especially Sally Field's) is painfully bad and once all of the characters are introduced, you can easily guess who's gonna live and who's gonna die. 

Worth watching only for a continuation of the original story, but even that's stretching it.  Skip it or watch it for a laugh.

Part 1 - The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
Remake 1 - The Poseidon Adventure (2005)
Remake 2 - Poseidon (2006)

THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972)

A fancy cruise ship is just innocently sailing along, minding it's own business, when BOOM! out of nowhere a nasty ol' wave flips it upside down and kicks sand in its face.  Now, all of the surviving passengers have to figure out how to escape this sinking tub of shit before they end up at the bottom of the ocean.

THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE advertises itself as having an all-star cast (and it does), but I'd wager most modern audiences have zero clue who Shelley Winters or Ernest Borgnine is, let alone somebody like Red Buttons.  But no matter, the adventure through the capsized ship is what I'm most interested in and...it's not very impressive.  Actually it kinda borders on boring.  After the boat flips upside down, it's decided that they need to journey to the engine room where the hull is the thinnest.  They head in that direction, but not a whole lot happens.  Water splashes about, fires burn and stuff is upside down, but I never got a real feel of danger or even a sense of where the hell they where.  In DIE HARD, when Bruce Willis was traveling around inside (and outside) the skyscraper that was super exciting, but here it just looked like a bunch of actors flopping about on a film set.

Dated special effects, an all-star cast, exciting premise that never pays off, lots of yelling, weak female characters, boring action scenes, under-cooked character development, hippie band singing an annoying song, Shelley Winters swimming underwater, Ernest Borgnine saying "Holy fuck!", Gene Hackman holding his breath for over 3 minutes, random heroics.  Good for a guilty pleasure, but that's about it.  That said, I probably watch this wet turkey a few times a year.

Part 2 - Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979)
Remake 1 - The Poseidon Adventure (2005)
Remake 2 - Poseidon (2006)

 Interesting how the ship is flipping over, but yet the ornaments are still falling to the floor.