Review of When Time Ran Out... (1980) by Stuart K — 05 Sep 2012
Produced by Irwin Allen (The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974) and The Swarm (1978)), the was the end of an era. The last disaster film of it's kind produced by Allen, who retreated back into TV after this was done.
It was such a notorious flop that disaster films went out of vogue until Roland Emmerich brought them back over a decade later. Set on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean, where a newly constructed luxury resort is attracting tourists, Hank Anderson (Paul Newman) is drilling for oil on the island when he is told that a nearby active volcano is about to erupt.
The resort's hotel has loads of guests in it, Anderson goes to tell hotel owner Shelby Gilmore (William Holden) about the situation, but he isn't sure how to sort it out, but the general manager Bob Spangler (James Franciscus) ignores the warnings and tells the guests everything will be OK.
Indeed the volcano does block up, and Anderson and Gilmore, with a small band of tourists, including Tom Conti (Ernest Borgnine), Rene Valdez (Burgess Meredith) and his wife Rose (Valentina Cortese) and Valentina Cortese (Red Buttons) head for higher ground on the other side of the island.
It's a very silly action film, and even for 1980, there is some shockingly bad special effects on display, and the acting is hammy at the best of time, and the action films are either anti-climactic or too long, like one scene on a collapsed bridge.
It should have been so much better, the title promises a lot, but it doesn't.
This review of When Time Ran Out... (1980) was written by Stuart K on 05 Sep 2012.
When Time Ran Out... has generally received negative reviews.
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