There are scares to be found in disaster impresario Irwin Allen’s sloppy, schlocky made-for-television production of Flood! (1976), but few involve water, which is mostly shrouded in darkness when it’s shown at all. You might instead scream at a closeup of Francine York’s false eyelashes, probably the only structure in town strong enough to withstand the rushing currents.
Or perhaps you’ll shriek in fright as Robert Culp tries, and miserably fails, to emote during a dramatic revelation scene that screenwriter Don Ingalls (Fantasy Island) mangled almost beyond comprehension. Others might fear they’re losing their grip on sanity at all the age-mismatched couples. My favorite was baby-faced Abbie (Carol Lynley, enormously pregnant with a pillow) and Sam Adams (Cameron Mitchell, enormously pregnant with a bad toupee, his face pulled back so tightly it’s uncertain whether he could see).
Sam runs the Fern Lodge in Brownsville, a resort town that’s desperate for tourists following what is alternately referred to as three weeks or 30 days of rain. Culp’s Steve Brannigan, a roguish helicopter pilot with an easy game show host smile, is an out-of-towner ferrying fisherman Roddy McDowell (who delivers a few short lines contemptuously and is never heard from again) to Sam’s spread; all the rest of Sam’s reservations have been canceled.
Brannigan seems like the kind of guy who wears Sex Panther cologne around nurses and stewardesses, which makes him a perfect foil for old buddy Paul Burke (Martin Milner), a salt of the earth family man. A local who is convinced the town’s dam is about to burst, permanently ending tourism—and more than a few lives—Paul is at odds with both pro-business mayor John Cutler (Richard Basehart), his future father-in-law, and his fellow city council members. To paraphrase “Delta Dawn,” everyone in Brownsville thinks Paul’s crazy.
Rejecting Paul’s proposal to open the spillway gate and lower the water level, John insists that Sam has successfully plugged the hole that Brannigan noticed just hours earlier. “There’s no crisis,” John assures him. “It’s been leaking for fifty years, it’s an earthen dam!”
“That’s just the point,” Paul says angrily. “There’s been too many leaks for too many years!”
About 87 different urgent conversations and arguments about the dam are still to follow, all with melodramatic repetition like something from a comedy sketch. Paul, who believes John is suppressing a damning engineer’s report about the structure’s safety, confronts him privately, as does John’s wife, Alice (Teresa Wright, of the indelible Hitchcock classic Shadow of a Doubt).
“In 24 years of marriage, I don’t ever remember you admitting you were wrong. Not even once,” she tells him, before making a devastating admission about their relationship. Wright’s performance is one of the film’s few highlights, but she’s given little screen time.
Once the dam finally bursts, all that talk is replaced by action, much of it only moderately suspenseful and some of it slightly difficult to follow due to careless editing and a dark nighttime setting. Flood! and 1977’s Fire!—the titles were styled both with and without exclamation marks—were Allen’s attempts to cash in on the box office success of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. Directed with dull, workmanlike efficiency by TV veteran Earl Bellamy (Valentine Magic on Love Island), Flood! is the type of film that demands you make your own fun.
To that end, I’ll admit I entertained myself at times by inventing taboo sex acts that Culp’s red neckerchief, which figures prominently in the plot, might signify. And by laughing at the absurdity of making Paul the childhood sweetheart of the considerably younger Mary (Barbara Hershey), the Cutlers’ daughter. But the campy lowlight came when a mother stood in the doorway of the town’s hospital and tearfully asked “Why go through it all, if it’s to end this way? I raised them to be six years old. Beautiful. Lovely. Just to have them murdered by a flood!”
If that tickles your demented funny bone, you’re the right audience for Flood! Anyone else might be more entertained by standing under a garden hose.
Streaming and DVD availability
Flood! is available on DVD from the Warner Archive collection and is coming to Blu-ray in September, 2023 as part of Shout! Factory’s Irwin Allen: Master of Disaster Collection. It isn’t currently on any streaming platforms.
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Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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