WHEN TIME RAN OUT... (1980)

Note to self: never build a resort hotel next to a volcano.

Holden and Newman are back together again, baby!!!  Hell yeah.  This time, instead of fighting a towering inferno, they're fighting, well, actually they're just running like hell from a pissed off volcano.  And that's about it.  The End.

WHEN TIME RAN OUT... is alright.  I don't like those three dots at the end of the title, but the location photography in Hawaii is beautiful and the build-up stuff is fun.  William Holden is a rich dude and very busy, so when his hotel manager guy, James Franciscus, tells him everything is okay, he believes him.  So what if the volcano right next door to the hotel is smoking and lava's bubbling like it's a fucking witches cauldron.  That's nature, baby!

And the volcano ain't the only thing blowing it's load around here...Holden proposes to his secretary (Jacqueline Bisset), but she's secretly seeing local oil man (Paul Newman); Franciscus is cheating on his wife (Holden's goddaughter) with a hotel employee who happens to be engaged to another employee who is secretly Franciscus' illegitimate half-brother!!!  What the hell?  That's a lot to take in.  It's awesome and so pointless!  I love it.

Poor looking special effects, medium pace that actually gets slower as the film goes on, random tidal wave, Jacqueline Bisset in a low cut t-shirt, people crowding a helicopter like it's a zombie movie, zero nudity, a glass-bottomed elevator thing that actually lowers people down into the volcano(!!!), lava bombs, silly story.  Honestly, the best thing about WHEN TIME RAN OUT... is the cast.  The movie's not very good (it kinda feels like an old made-for-TV movie), but it's fun watching all of these big names running around.  (Red Buttons' speed walk is goddamn hilarious!)  I have no regrets about watching it and will most likely watch it again...at least the first two acts.  The third kinda stunk. 

Rumor has it WHEN TIME RAN OUT... had a budget of $20 million and brought in less than $4 million at the box office.  Ouch.

Post-review thoughts: I have absolutely nothing to back this up, but while watching the film, I kept thinking to myself that the character of Mona seemed like it would be perfect for Shelley Winters.  The actress even seemed to act a little bit like Shelley, at least to me.  It wasn't until later that I discovered the actress, Sheila Allen, was actually producer Irwin Allen's wife.

INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE (2016)

Twenty years after the original alien invasion, humanity has recovered and even made magnificent advancements based on the technology found among the wreckage of the downed alien ships.  Things take a turn for the worse when a wormhole opens up near the Moon and an alien spaceship pops out.  It doesn't look like the spaceships from the original invasion, but the humans don't care.  They shoot that sucker down (using a giant laser they've built on the Moon) almost instantly.  That wasn't a smart move because the spaceship belonged to some other aliens who hate the shit out of the original Earth invaders.  D'oh!

So now the original aliens show back up (in a spaceship that looks to be like 15% the size of Earth) and start bringing a new and improved ruckus.  The new and improved ruckus includes a huge "hive queen" alien that actually climbs out of a spaceship after it was shot down and starts running around all over the place.  That was kinda cool.  Unfortunately, the cool parts like that (and the gigantic new mothership landing) are outweighed by uncool shit like the "meh" cast of newcomers and the script that goes off the rail in the final act.

I didn't dislike INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE, in fact, it was entertaining from beginning to end, but I was just hoping for so much more.  Something original.  This story has the potential to be awesome, but instead the filmmakers take the safe PG-13 route with the extremely predictable story that relies too heavily on the pretty special effects and nostalgic feelings from the first film and not at all on creating believable characters that the audience would actually care about.  These people were all so boring and/or unlikable that I was almost rooting for the aliens.

Nice special effects, average pace, goofy ending, cringy dialogue, lots of missed potential, moon milk, a fast as fuck school bus, some guy saying "No one else dies today." then like a million people die immediately afterwards.  As far as guilty please movies goes, INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE is worth checking out.

If you need me, I'll be in my room reading Robert McCammon's awesome dual alien invasion novel, "The Border".

Part 1 - Independence Day (1996)