Later this month a new disaster flick hits the cinemas, Twisters.
You'll recognise the name from the Nineties guster, Twister. They've just added an S.
The old Twister starred the late great Bill Paxton, who is best known to Sci-fiers of our age as the jittery private Hudson in ALIENS. I remember clearly Bill chucking a shed load of small balls up into a tornado in Twister. I think they were trackers. I wonder if the new Twisters film has balls?
Twister was part of that Nineties disaster triple that defined the genre for the decade in my mind: the other two flicks being Dante's Peak and Deep Impact.
You could shove in Independence Day, Armageddon and Lake Placid as well, but they seem outliers to the main hat-trick of disasters.
All three had there peaks and cracks but I recall them all fondly.
Memorable bits for me were: the balls of Twister, the pyroclastic cloud in Dantes Orak and probably the most memorable bit among many in Deep Impact for me was early on when the astronomer Dr.Wolf checks the kid Beiderman's floppy disc, says something like 'now were you going in such a hurry little fella?' and drops his slice of gooey pizza when he sees the end-point! I love that scene! Dunno why!
Did you like Nineties disasters readers?
An asteroid strike could cause other disasters so could spawn a limited series.
ReplyDeleteTornadoes are almost Kaiju...the Tuscaloosa tornado of 2011 had many horizontal vortices
I agree.
DeleteI liked them for their SFX, which were still mostly model based back then. I did a bunch of disaster based documentary stuff about tornados, earthquakes and tsunamis in the 90s for the BBC, and in the 2000s for the Discovery Channel.
ReplyDeleteWe often looked at the movie methods used in those films and adapted them for our TV budget programmes.
Just catching up. Wow, disaster documentaries Mish. You had a varied career. Do you have an online link to any of the programmes?
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