The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

[7] A gaggle of Oscar-winners go topsy-turvy and fight to survive when a luxury liner capsizes at sea in the trend-setting disaster flick, The Poseidon Adventure. The film delivers on producer Irwin Allen's desire to blow shit up (think of…
Final Destination (2000)

Final Destination (2000)

[7] When a high school class boards a plane for a field trip to Paris, one of the students (Devon Sawa) has a premonition that the plane will explode. He freaks out and unboards, bringing a few others with him…
Earthquake (1974)

Earthquake (1974)

[5] Earthquake is one of many disaster films that came out in the early '70s -- the kind where a rag-tag team of waning celebrities band together to get thrown around for a couple of hours. In this one, Charlton…
Godzilla (2014)

Godzilla (2014)

[7] I'm always on the lookout for a good monster movie, and Godzilla is one of the most legendary monsters in movie history, right? But he's still not a sure thing. We all remember the Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich…
Independence Day (1996)

Independence Day (1996)

[7] The Irwin Allen disaster epic is alive and well in this 1996 summer blockbuster in which evil aliens threaten to destroy Earth, leaving it up to a rag-tag team of politicians, soldiers, and scientists (plus a drunken crop-duster and…
Airport 1975 (1974)

Airport 1975 (1974)

[6]

I don’t normally like bad movies. I don’t usually subscribe to the “so bad, it’s good” mentality. Bad is just bad. But there are rare exceptions and Airport 1975 is one them. First of all, the Airport franchise is ridiculous. I mean, they made four of these things, and it’s the same story every time: a plane full of celebrities falls into jeopardy and needs a’savin’. This is the second in the series — and the most enjoyable. How could it not be? Check this shit out:

The Mothman Prophecies (2002)

The Mothman Prophecies (2002)

[5] After the mysterious death of his wife sends him on a hunt for clues, a journalist ends up in a small West Virginia town where a series of strange events and sightings of a shadowy, supernatural character portend an…
Gravity (2013)

Gravity (2013)

[6]

Gravity is so harrowing, I’m tempted to call it crisis porn. The movie stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts stranded in orbit over Earth after debris destroys their spacecraft. Director Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men, A Little Princess) warns us from the get-go with some on-screen text that life in space is impossible, and then proceeds to throw everything you can imagine at Bullock and Clooney’s characters. They’ve got dwindling oxygen supplies, they’ve got the debris looping back around at them every ninety minutes, their spacesuits are running out of propulsion, and their connection to Huston has gone dark. There are the threats of burning alive, freezing to death, drowning, and slipping into coma. They see other members of their crew frozen solid, flesh exposed to the vacuum of space — one guy with a tidy hole clean through his head.

Airport ’77 (1977)

Airport ’77 (1977)

[5] The least entertaining (even in a cheezy way) of the Airport disaster ilk. The star-studded cast seems to realize what a turkey they're in, but mad cheers to Olivia de Havilland, Christopher Lee, Lee Grant, and Darren McGavin for…
The Towering Inferno (1974)

The Towering Inferno (1974)

[7] Steve McQueen and Paul Newman help rescue people trapped in a flaming highrise in Irwin Allen's disaster opus, The Towering Inferno. It is what it is -- we all at one time or another want to watch disaster unfold…