cinema history class: cyclone (1978)

The session: "April is the Cruelest Month -- Cardona's Catastrophes"
Four movies by the two Rene Cardonas -- father and son

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 2: Cyclone (1978)
Directed by Rene Cardona, Jr.

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I hadn't heard of this.

Plot:
A freak cyclone in the Caribbean sinks boats and planes alike, leaving a sightseeing boat full of people adrift at sea with its occupants struggling to survive.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
In some very obvious ways, Cyclone seems like a reworking of Survive!, which we saw a week earlier. In both, a bunch of passengers are stuck in the middle of nowhere, presumed dead, with dwindling food, no way of communicating with or getting back to civilization. The obvious difference, of course, is that in Survive! the cast are stuck in the snow in the Andes. In Cyclone, they're stuck in a boat on the open ocean. In both movies, some of the lost passengers go off on their own in search of help. And both movies pander to the baser senses by featuring cannibalism.

That said, there are some very important differences. Survive! was a very tight movie with a very straightforward simple plot and very little inn the way of character development or what I'll call sidetrips. By contrast, Cyclone is a complex mess. The barely-surviving passengers aren't all from one boat. Some had been on an airplane that crashed in the ocean, and some had been on a fishing boat. Somehow they all managed to find their way together onto the sightseeing boat, which was only supposed to be on a three-hour tour. And, unsatisfied with the basic premise, the movie seems to throw the kitchen sink at the victims. All those run-ins with sharks were like butter upon bacon. And the movie tries its darnedest to develop the characters. And yet I couldn't be moved to give a crap about any of them. The woman giving birth on the boat (and the baby)? Whatever. The idiot who thought her dog was as important as the human passengers? Fuck her. And her little dog too.

The attempts at character development and the unneeded extra hardships added extra time to the movie that it could have done without.

Ratings
Me: 6
Bob-O: 7.5
Christina: 8.3
Dave: 9
Ethan: 7
Kursat: 8.5