Disaster Flicks Mass Destruction Of All Kinds Is Filling Up Movie Screens This Year

Bell-bottom pants have made a dubious comeback. So has disco. Now, Hollywood is channeling the spirit of the 1970s with disaster movies - and betting big on the outcome.

Beginning with last weekend’s debut of the volcano epic “Dante’s Peak,” a horde of supercharged special-effects films will test the limits of audience fascination with mass destruction.

Movie studios are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the genre, with the risk of their own disaster at the box office.

“Nobody wants to make a big disaster movie, a disaster disaster movie,” said Roger Donaldson, who directed Pierce Brosnan, Linda Hamilton and a digitally created mountain with a temper in “Dante’s Peak” (filmed on location in Wallace).

Last spring’s “Twister” was just the tip of the iceberg (not the one that sunk the Titanic, although there’s a film coming about that, too). Audiences in 1997 are getting not one, but two volcanoes, that killer ice chunk and one deadly flood - so far.

“It is the only movie with a flood in it (so far), but God only knows,” said Mark Gordon, co-producer of “Flood,” which stars Morgan Freeman and Christian Slater and is planned for a May release.

“Volcano,” with Tommy Lee Jones caught up in a Los Angeles lava flow, is planned for spring after losing a heated race with “Dante’s Peak” to be first in theaters.

“Titanic,” the oft-told tale of the ill-fated luxury liner - this time starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet and “Twister’s” Bill Paxton - will be out in summer.

Even television is getting in on the act during sweeps month. There’s the miniseries “Asteroid” airing Sunday and Monday on NBC, and the ABC movie “Volcano: Fire on the Mountain” on Feb. 23.

While studio executives dream of “Twister”-sized profits - the film has grossed $242 million domestically - there’s a nightmare alternative: “Daylight,” the Sylvester Stallone trapped-in-a-tunnel film, has made just $32 million so far.

That may have been good enough for 1970s Irwin Allen-produced epics such as “The Poseidon Adventure” and “Towering Inferno,” but the stakes have been raised by 1990s production and promotion costs that can soar to $100 million-plus.

Advanced special effects, key to the success of any action film these days, contribute to the inflated budgets. They also are behind the resurgence of such films.

“Part of the reason all the studios went back to disaster movies is they thought, ‘Oh, we can really make this look cool,”’ said Les Bohem, who wrote both “Daylight” and “Dante’s Peak.”

“It’s the same reason they went back to the dinosaur movie or the Martian-attack movie.”

Bohem himself was sucked in by the potential for awesome imagery after seeing a National Geographic magazine article detailing a volcanic eruption.

“The centerfold photo was of a truck being chased by a pyroclastic cloud,” he recalled. “I really wanted to go to a theater and see that.”

Such a vast, fast-moving cloud of gases, ash and rock fragments is part of the climax of “Dante’s Peak.” The movie also offers up an eye-popping array of earthquakes, lava flows, boiling hot springs and acidic, flesh-dissolving lakes.

But Bohem - who defines a disaster film as one in which “the antagonist is God instead of a European guy in a ponytail” - contends that effects cannot guarantee a good movie.

“The problem has always been the bigger your disaster, the harder it is to wedge in an interesting story about interesting characters,” he said. “There’s a point at which the flood just washes away all your characters or it’s more interesting to watch the Titanic sink than worry about who’s on board.”

Perhaps that’s partly why some filmmakers are quick to distance themselves from the disaster pack, as with “Flood’s” Gordon and his co-producer, Gary Levinsohn.

“That’s one of the hardest challenges we have with the picture,” Levinsohn said. “We are working incredibly hard to position it so that the first question everybody asks is not, ‘There are six disaster films. How do you feel about that?”’

OK, so why is “Flood” more than the sum of its disaster parts?

“There’s a great tradition of those Irwin Allen movies … but that wasn’t what we were trying to do,” Gordon said. “We were trying to tell a great story and set it in a flood, as opposed to saying, ‘Let’s do a movie about a flood and try to figure out a story for it.”’

His film’s title, of course, plays up the Allenesque aspect. But one industry figure understands trying to have your cake and eat it, too: While enthusiasm may be high for disaster movies, he says, it’s possible “the tide has already turned and audiences are sick of them.”

Filmmakers also may chafe at being lumped in with so-called “popcorn movies,” the kind critics condemn as visually spectacular but undemanding intellectually.

No less a figure than George Lucas, however, argues that popcorn films, including his newly re-released 1977 space adventure “Star Wars,” contribute to a balanced film industry.

“Popcorn movies and the amount of revenue they’ve generated has allowed theater owners to build more multiplexes and allowed the kind of art films once shown in obscure art houses to come into the mainstream,” Lucas said.

More quality dramas like “Secrets & Lies” or “Dead Man Walking” are more widely distributed now, he said, as popcorn pictures “have made the industry strong enough to be very diverse.”

Producers of competing disaster epics may feel there’s a bit less diversity than they’d like. But they’re trying to be philosophical.

Said Gordon: “You can only make your picture and everybody else should make theirs. And it’s a tough summer and we all survive.”