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.