When Time Ran Out (1980)

Irwin Allen is generally credited with ushering in the 1970's disaster film craze with the iconic 1972 film The Poseidon Adventure (though a case could be made for the 1970 film Airport being the true origin point of this phenomena). Lesser known however is the fact that it was also an Irwin Allen film, When Time Ran Out (produced by Allen but directed by James Goldstone) that pretty well spelled the death of the disaster film as a successful Hollywood genera until the mid 1990's. People say terrible things about When Time Ran Out, and while I'll admit that the featured volcano is far from credible, I really didn't think it was that bad of a film. I mean its a clichéd film, we've all seen everything it does done better, the love triangles, the Love Boat- esque studding of the film with fading stars, the mass death of extras (note to bit players in disaster films, when the cast starts to divide into two groups, always follow the group with the most big name actors in it, you'll be more likely to survive that way), but I didn't think anything in this film was really bad by genera standards, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure was way worse.

For what it is When Time Ran Out is a serviceable film, which had it come out two years earlier then it did would probably have been a big hit (in reality though the film grossed a little under four million dollars on a twenty million dollar budget). I think the problem was that the market had been saturated by this kind of production for too long, and this movie just happened to be the one released as audience interest for this type of fair plummeted. The movie has workable if paint by numbers drama (two love triangles, a major authority figure who refuses to see the danger of the smoking volcano ect) as well as the kind of cheese and hackneyed writing that is a guilty pleasure, like how Burgess Meredith is introduces as a retired hire wire artist and you just spend the film waiting for a circumstance to develop where his hire wire skills are going to prove essential. So I think this can be appreciated at least as b movie, it doesn't do anything great, but it doesn't do anything completely terrible either. **