The Poseidon Adventure: Special Edition

The 2006 release of Poseidon proved yet again that most remakes are nothing more than redundant, unnecessary flotsam in the pop-cultural whirlpool. That's why the original 1972 Irwin Allen production of The Poseidon Adventure, directed by Ronald Neame, remains a perennial favorite—why remake a camp classic, when you can gussy up the original with a “special edition” DVD release? Hands down, this is the best movie (and one of the first) to come out of the seemingly endless cycle of disaster flicks that dominated the box office during the 1970s. It could even be argued that Titanic owes some of its success to the precedent set by this blockbuster starring Gene Hackman as a priest who leads a small group of survivors to safety from the flooding depths of a capsized luxury liner. From its stellar cast (Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters, Red Buttons, Roddy McDowall, Carol Lynley, Stella Stevens) to its cheesy, Oscar-winning theme song, “The Morning After,” The Poseidon Adventure has it all: filmed on spectacular sets where everything is upside down and the vessel's thick hull points in the direction of salvation, this is "a waterlogged Grand Hotel" (in the words of New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael) that's as entertaining as it is dramatically earnest. It's also the only movie—unless you count her underwater corpse in Night of the Hunter—that lets Winters strut her stuff as an aquatic heroine. Presented with an excellent transfer on a two-disc set, bonus features on the first disc here include two audio commentaries (one by director Neame, the other by Lynley, Stevens and costar Pamela Sue Martin) and an interactive “Follow the Escape” option to access the ship's map during the film. The second disc includes an episode of AMC's Backstory on the film, storyboard-to-film comparisons, a whole slew of new featurettes covering several aspects of the film, and stills galleries. Recommended. [Note: The Towering Inferno: Special Edition is also available.] (J. Shannon)