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In 1976, Irwin Allen took the dis­as­ter flick for­mula he invented in The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno and attempted to scale it down to tele­vi­sion size by pro­duc­ing a few made-for-t.v. movies in this vein.  The first of these was Flood!, a cut-rate blend of adven­ture and drama that pit­ted a small Oregon town against an unre­li­able dam.  Unfortunately, the main thing that gets destroyed in this sur­pris­ingly dreary effort is enter­tain­ment value.

If you’ve ever seen a dis­as­ter movie then you know exactly what is going to hap­pen in this flick.  Within the first few min­utes of Flood!, the dam that over­looks a lit­tle Oregon town is sprout­ing small but notice­able leaks due to recent heavy rain­fall.  Copter pilot Steve (Robert Culp) spots one of these leaks and duti­fully informs his busi­ness part­ner, Paul (Martin Milner), who asks the Mayor Cutler (Richard Basehart) to drain the reser­voir.  However, this will drain the fish out of the lake and reduce fish­ing lodge busi­ness so he refuses.  However, things quickly get worse and pretty soon it’s tidal wave city for the townies.

Despite the ser­vice­able (if cookie-cutter) premise, Flood! fails to deliver the dis­as­trous goods.  The main rea­son is that scaled-to-television nature of the movie works against it in a big way.  Allen for­got that the fun of his cin­e­matic spec­ta­cles was their epic sprawl — the huge sets, the mas­sive name-star casts, the inflated run­ning times and the mul­ti­ple scenes of destruc­tion.  Without that kind of megabucks excess to prop it up, Flood! looks exactly like the tri­fle that it is.

In fair­ness, Allen did spring for a decent t.v.-level cast — in addi­tion to the names men­tioned above, Flood! also fea­tures Barbara Hershey, Cameron Mitchell, Carol Lynley and Roddy McDowell — but the film’s lim­ited size ensures they have lit­tle to do.  Hershey in par­tic­u­lar is wasted in a role as the mayor’s daughter/fiancé of Paul.  She tries really hard to breathe some human­ity into the role so it’s a shame the char­ac­ter is so minor in the scheme of things.  However, the real “throw­away role” award goes to McDowell, who appears in exactly one scene as a lodge vis­i­tor at the begin­ning and is never seen again.

Also, the money spent secur­ing the cast seems to have resulted in corner-cutting at every other level.  After some decent minia­ture effects show­ing the destruc­tion of the dam, the rest of the flood-induced dis­as­ter is sug­gested via grimy-looking stock footage.  The script restricts itself in a way that sug­gests fore­seen bud­get restric­tions, rely­ing on a whole lot of soap-opera ban­ter to fill the lengthy spaces between disaster-oriented set­pieces.  It also sets up a bunch of sub­plots that it mostly cops out on fin­ish­ing (for instance, char­ac­ters get bumped off but we never get to see their sig­nif­i­cant oth­ers react to the news).  Director and t.v. vet Earl Bellamy keeps it all from going off the rails but can’t really over­come the chintzy nature of the proceedings.

The actors do their best but they don’t have much to work with.  Robert Culp comes off the best, using his “cool cynic” per­sona to fill in the blanks left by the script, and it’s always fun to watch Mitchell ham­ming it up.  Milner is the real lead of the film and he tries hard but he’s got a kind of t.v. bland­ness that works against him: he’s per­fect for a fea­tured role in a hour-long drama but not charis­matic enough to carry a whole film.  The most amus­ing per­for­mance may come from Lynley, who plays a seri­ously preg­nant woman trapped in a flood­ing house.  Her scenes of labor pains and deal­ing with the ris­ing waters play like their own self-parodies  and she lays on the histri­on­ics in a suit­ably smile-inducing manner.

Ultimately, Flood! is a curi­ously numb­ing expe­ri­ence.  It goes through the motions in a com­pe­tent but unin­spired man­ner that is not good enough to be com­pelling and not bad enough to rate as a camp-classic howler.  Only com­pletists and masochists need apply.