Movie Notes: Meteor
0 stars
So Bad It’s Good Rating –4 stars
Starring Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Karl Malden
Directed by Ronald Neame
Synopsis
A meteor hurtles toward earth. Only scientist Paul Bradley (Sean Connery) can save humanity. Hilarity ensues.
The Good
- Surprising amount of stars: Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Martin Landau, and Henry Fonda as the President. Connery is passable as a secretive scientist that can save the world, but his presence in this flick has me wondering what the hell he was thinking in the seventies, what with Zardoz. Landau is miscast but highly amusing as the obligatory high up general whose primary purpose is to get angry a lot about the stupidity of the plan, specifically, collaboration with the Russians.
The Bad
- Produced by Samuel Arkoff, a name that should ring some serious alarm bells. He was responsible for the 60s beach party genre and many early 70s horror films. His formula for a successful low-budget movie is: action, revolution, killing, oratory, fantasy, and fornication. All are on ample display in this flick.
- The list of crap-tastic aspects are endless: pointless camera zooms (meaning, the camera zooms in on a character as if they’re about to say something important, but don’t), a pointless intro narration explaining what a meteor is and what past civilizations thought about them, and special effects beamed in from the 1960s.
- The film’s basic pattern through the first half: people on earth scream and yell about what to do, cut to the big scary meteor hurtling toward earth, yet another tiresome scene of people arguing about what to do. The movie picks up a lot when the meteors start falling and said people start dying.
Conclusion
This flick falls fast into so-bad-its-good territory, and is a disaster amid the genre of 70s disaster movies. Perhaps that would be a better film to make: a disaster movie about the making of a disaster movie. At some point the cast realizes the movie is going to sink like the Titanic and they strangle the director.
IMDB: Meteor
Wikipedia: Meteor
Rotten Tomatoes: Meteor Meteor 9%