Truly Dreadful Film

i must have seen a different film!!

Good movie but grossly overrated

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

My standard disclosure, even though I've watched Avalanche what seems like a million years ago, I rewatched it this week courtesy of the new MST3K. I've always prided myself in my ability to separate MST3K from the movie being presented and not let the jokes cloud my judgment of the movie. In this instance, it hardly matters because Avalanche is just plain old bad regardless of what format you're watching it in. Why is Avalanche so bad? For a movie that is supposed to be about a ski resort buried under (as they tagline puts it) "Six Million Tons of Icy Terror", it's really more about the failed relationship of the ski resort's owner and his wife. Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow play the troubled couple. The problem is they have zero in the way of on- screen chemistry. I'm not sure of a married couple in the history of film that has less chemistry than these two. Their whole relationship feels fake and phony. And it doesn't help anything that three quarters of the film centers around Hudson trying to reignite his relationship with Farrow. It's just pathetic. Beyond the problems with the big name leads, the movie has other issues. Chief among them is a string of nameless, faceless characters that are presented in rapid fashion style that I didn't know or care about. Though I didn't know them, most seemed so annoying I was rooting for them to die. This most likely wasn't the filmmakers were going for. Add to that some poor special effects, ridiculous dialogue, and alcoholism as the punch line to most of the film's jokes and you've got a stinker. I know Producer Roger Corman was trying to cash-in on the 1970s era disaster movie craze. But the budgetary limitations put on the movie by Corman's New World Pictures proved to be the real disaster. Well, that and the Hudson/Farrow relationship debacle.

Roger Corman's cheapo entry in the disaster movie sweepstakes. It has not aged well. Hard headed land developer Rock Hudson builds a ski resort at the foot of not so stable mountain. Environmentalist Robert Forster tries to stop him. When there's an avalanche, shown via some dim special effects, a lot of people are trampled, buried in snow and asphyxiated. Hudson yells nearly every line of dialog in what is perhaps his worst performance. Forster looks tired (or bored) and Mia Farrow (as Hudson's ex-wife) is simply out of place in this type of movie. Jeanette Nolan, who once played opposite Orson Welles in MACBETH, is featured as Hudson's free-spirited mother. Barry Primus is cast as a talk show host! Directed, very blandly, by former actor Corey Allen. Lewis Teague did some of the second unit work.

I remember seeing this on T.V. in the early '80's, and even though I was still kind of young, I thought it was awful. Rock Hudson should really have been more selective of the scripts he accepted. some of his films are really good, and others like "embryo" and this piece of drek should have been left to the next generation of actors.now for the scene that I thought was the funniest of the whole movie. it happens at the very end as the camera is pulling away and the screen starts to fade to black. If I remember the scene correctly, a group of people are still in either a wrecked hotel or a cave and some guys wife has just been declared dead. as the camera pulls back you can clearly see the "dead woman" stand up and walk off set.

I was surprised to see that Avalanche was produced by Roger Corman of all people. I would think that even the skimpy budget that this film had by Irwin Allen standards was not something Roger Corman was used to dealing with. Corman didn't spend it on big name guest stars for sure. His stars are Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow. Hudson is the Donald Trump like owner of a big state of the art ski lodge which is hosting that weekend some winter sporting events. He's been told like William Holden in The Towering Inferno that the lodge is in a bad place and the snow looks like it's about to come a tumbling down.Tumble down it did during a storm when a plane crashes into the top of a mountain. The Avalanche starts and it buries the whole cast in that white stuff. This is a disaster film made on the cheap, some winter sports footage mixed with real avalanche footage and some cheesy special effects by seventies standards to bind it together. The plot such as it is, is almost non-existent, the characters are never developed in the slightest, so you don't really care about them.I guess the lesson to be learned from Avalanche is for Roger Corman not to try to be Irwin Allen.