Is The Poseiden Adventure A Gay Cult Film?

You forgot me, Rogo, you son of a bitch!

Two words: Shaft Alley.

Because there’s got to be a morning after.

Hot pants, silver platform shoes, a giant Christmas tree and Belle's underwater swim...it's hell upside down!

I adored Shelley winters in this film .

I went to an anniversary screening at the Warner Grand in San Pedro, CA and it’s one of the campiest things I ever did.

All I’ll say is I definitely appreciated Gene’s hairy dad bod in those tight 70’s clothes.

Amen, R7. Gene Hackman was my first realization that sex appeal and physical beauty are not the same thing.

It's a gay classic because they show it almost every week during Sunday Showtunes at Sidetrack in Chicago. They play it to Maureen McGovern's "There's Got To Be a Morning After". Shelly's underwater scenes always elicits cheers.

Well there is this.

Panties!

It was a shit film when it came out, much derided even on release.

Miss Carol Lynley y'all

It’s havoc and devastation in evening gowns - what could be more camp? And what were once highly celebrated and awarded special effects, now look like people running back and forth on an incline across the camera.

My parents mistakenly took us kids to see it at a Drive-In. Ever since then, I've had a (reasonable) phobia about cruise ships.

Two more words:

AIR POCKETS!

I thought the film was riveting.

Well it ain’t Masterpiece Theatre R12

I find it succeeds at being what it is. An escapist disaster romp, popcorn flick.

Loved it as a kid. Took my friends' kids to the Josh Lucas remake and they loved it, but I thought it was a ... disaster, all special effects with no soul, no camp, no Shelley.

R19 ITA about the remake. BORING, bland cast. All the females were brunette 20somethings; you couldn't tell them apart! Josh Lucas had a sexy blond stud thing going for him but it wasn't enough to propel him into being a leading man.

The original film works because you had very definite star personalities in every role. And, story wise it flowed very well...the movie is really like playing a video game moving from one set piece up to another. It's actually a very well constructed film except for the abruptly weird non-ending which really required that that the ship finally sink but Irwin Allen was too cheap to shoot that.

Yup Shelly's death scene was epic.As was macho man Ernest Borgnine's gripping heartbreak. Pamela Sue Martin was too weepy.But i enjoyed the wigs and hairpieces.....and the claiming down the chandelier scene to safety.If you watch closely,the leading mans hairpiece keeps rearranging itself on his elderly face.

Don't forget me!

I don't know if it was because of The Morning After (can't recall if I'd heard it before I saw the movie) but 12-year-old me begged my older sister for it to be the film we went to see to fill in a couple of hours while we were in Sydney for the day. She didn't want to but I pleaded and cajoled and may have even wept and eventually won out. It might have been the poster that caught my imagination. I dunno. But I loved it, and she enjoyed it too. I even 'followed' the careers of Carol Lynley and Stella Stevens for a while after that though sadly (for them) that didn't occupy too much of my time - just the occasional Rockford Files episode. I recall being really sad when Linda died - you think by then they are all going to make it so that deaths came as a shock. I think it, along with Airport 75, are the best of the disaster movies. Towering Inferno never caught my imagination in the way Poseidon Adventure did.

Shelly Winters performance made it an instant camp classic.

Shelley is fine; deliciously hammy, but the real gem in The Poseidon Adventure is the glorious Stella Stevens.

She's such a deliciously vivid bitch....but, with a heart of gold. She looks stricken when she finds out Shelley is dead.

In former happy days we would sometimes enjoy as many as FIVE sizemeats in one day: our husband, a hot number, and three generou$ gentlemen!!

So relevant, r26.

"Maybe you can just yell, 'this is the police!' and it'll open right up!"

My family was on vacation in Atlanta in 1973. The hotel where we were staying had this then new concept of "in-house movies" playing on special TV channels in the hotel. Poseidon Adventure was playing on a 24-hour loop -- as soon as it ended, the film started again.

The film played on that 24-hour loop the entire 4 days we were there. As a 10-year-old, this fascinated me, so I watched the film over and over. Must have watched it completely five or six times, and saw bits and pieces of it dozens more times. We would go to dinner and return to the room and I'd just start watching the movie again no matter what point it was in the story (by that point, I knew the film well enough to jump right back into it wherever it was in the plot).

Seems like the hotel had 2 or 3 other channels playing different movies on 24-hour loops, but whatever they were did not interest me. This gayling only wanted to watch Poseidon Adventure. And on our last morning at the hotel, a new in-house movie replaced Poseidon Adventure on the 24-hour loop. It felt like an appropriate time for us to move on.

Oddly enough, I can't tell you anything else we did on that trip to Atlanta. I only remember watching Poseidon Adventure on the in-house movie channel.

Good story R29. Did your family make any comment on your binge watching or join you in yet another viewing? Reminds me a bit of a story I told on some Sound of Music thread - the teenage daughter of friends of mine went with on a school trip to Europe as part of her history course - World War I battlefields in France and Belgium, World War II related sites in Germany etc. They ended up in Salzburg and were chuffed to find that Sound of Music was playing on one of the TV stations in their hotel room. 'How cool' they thought, 'we're in Salzburg and Sound of Music is on the TV'. Next day they found out that one station in Salzburg plays it on a 24-hour loop for all the SoM tourists who come to the town.

r30 Thanks. My mother and father watched Poseidon Adventure with me a time or two. Remember, in-house movies was a novel concept for all of us. After that, they were just happy I was being quiet, so didn't say much about me watching it repeatedly.

However, after a couple of days of Poseidon Adventure being on non-stop, my father insisted that we watch one of the other movies on the other 24-hour movie loops at the hotel. I reluctantly relented. But whatever movie we watched was fairly bland. Nothing noteworthy at all. And we also watched the movie on the third 24-hour loop, but it was really bad. I don't think we even made it through the whole thing. After that, we resumed watching Poseidon Adventure on a that 24-hour loop. Even my parents admitted that it was a very good movie.

And watching Poseidon Adventure over and over in that hotel room, triggered a love of disaster movies for me. When Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Airport, any of those subsequent disaster movies came out, I begged my mother to take me to them right away. Of course, none of those was as good as Poseidon Adventure.

And I forgot to say, the 24-hour movie loop was COMMERCIAL FREE. That too was novel concept for us -- movies on TV without any commercials!! A few years later when cable came to our town and we got HBO, we had a vague concept of what HBO was because of that hotel with the movies on the 24-hour, commercial free loop.

Yeah, me too terms in terms of becoming a disaster movie fan mainly because of Poseidon Adventure. I saw Airport first since it came out in 1969 (I think) but it wasn't so much of a disaster movie as a drama with a bit of disaster near the end. Of course the sequels went into full on disaster movie mode along with the casting of ex-stars and famous pop culture names (Helen Reddy etc). And yes I agree that Poseidon sits atop the pile, even without Karen Black. Even the song for Towering Inferno was a sub-standard The Morning After. I'm the poster who begged his sister to take him to see PA in Sydney so she and your mum could have compared notes on annoying kids and their determination to see certain movies.

R29, did you or your parents get out at all in Atlanta?

r33 Yes, we did some sightseeing while in Atlanta. We wouldn't have traveled 300 miles merely to sit in a hotel room and watch TV. But here 45 years later, I honestly can't remember any specifics about what we did. What I remember as a 10 year old was this exciting new thing called in house movies that played a relatively new movie (Poseidon Adventure had been released in theatres about 6 month earlier) on a 24-hour commercial free loop.