User Reviews

Among many other contemporary trends, hypes and sub-genres of the glorious 70s decade, yours truly is a diehard fan of typical disaster movies of that era! I love them so much! I've seen so many that I even developed a specific rating principle to check, via five simple little traits, if a certain disaster movie qualifies as good enough cheesy & clichéd entertainment!

Condition #1: without producer Irwin Allen, there wasn't a budget for special effects and thus no movie. Well, Allen was the producer of "Flood", but it's a made-for-TV film and hence the budget was significantly smaller than in, say, "The Towering Inferno" or "The Poseidon Adventure". Still, for a TV-film, it's looking quite good, so I'll give it 0,5 points. Condition #2: all disaster movies star one major star (Charlton Heston and Paul Newman were prime choices) and a long list of "secondary" stars (like Ernest Borgnine, Leslie Nielsen...). Another 0,5 points scored here. For reasons linked to the TV-movie status, there isn't a major star, but the list of secondary stars is nevertheless long and impressive: Robert Culp, Barbara Hershey, Richard Basehart, Cameron Mitchell, Roddy McDowall, Francine York, Teresa Wright, ... Condition #3: The characters are usually split into two camps with completely opposite ideals and/or initiatives. Oh, definitely the case here! The little Oregon fishing town of Brownsville is recovering after weeks of heavy rainfall and storm winds. Local entrepreneurs Steve and Paul are persuaded that the ecologically built dam will burst and drown the entire town, whereas the stubborn mayor irresponsibly keeps proclaiming that the dam will hold. Who do you think is right? Full point! Condition #4: Regardless what type of disaster we're dealing with, variants of the exact same perilous situations are always applicable. Yes, but limited. We have 9-months-pregnant women trapped in their homes, missing children and elderly women sacrificing themselves to rescue others, but that's about it. 0.75 points! Condition #5: always remember that, when the situation appears to be at its worst, it can and will still get even worse! I'm not handing out a point here. There aren't any sharks or piranhas coming along with the flood, the central hospital doesn't collapse, or the helicopter doesn't crash. So, theoretically speaking, Brownsville could be worse off.

All this adds up to a proper 2.75 rating, meaning "Flood!" is a recommendable and engaging disaster movie IF you are already familiar with the genre and if you are relatively tolerant. In case you seek pure blockbuster-fun, better stick to the mastodons of the era, like "Towering Inferno", "Earthquake" or the "Airport"-series.

PS: I'm still waiting for news on Roddy McDowall's character! Did he make it?

Earl Bellamy directed this TV movie produced by Irwin Allen that stars Robert Culp as a helicopter pilot who becomes involved in the plight of the town of Brownsville, which is in a state of alarm because heavy rains have caused the nearby dam to overflow, and threaten to destroy it all together. Martin Milner plays the man trying to warn the stubborn mayor(played by Richard Basehart) about the threat, but he doesn't want to hear it, which will lead to disaster for all... Cameron Mitchel, Carol Lynley, Barbara Hershey and Teresa Wright costar. Disappointing film is a big build-up to very little, and contains a talky story that generates little interest, though the good cast tries.

Irwin Allen did great on The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, Beyond The Poseidon Adventure, and The Swarm but this one was not one of his best. The special effects could have been much better. The acting was alright. I would recommend this movie to people who like disaster movies. Or people who have nothing else to do for the next 98 minutes

You ever watch a movie where the protagonist, even if he's in the right, is just so pushy and unlikable that you root against him? That's how it is with me and this TV disaster movie from producer Irwin Allen. The hero here is played by Martin Milner. He spends the entire first hour of the movie yelling at everyone, including women and senior citizens, one of whom he manhandles. He's so intense in every scene. It's like he's looking for a fight, even when he's talking to his buddy or his (much younger) girlfriend. He really got on my nerves. Then the flood comes and yay he was right - I guess - but I just kept hoping the flood would get him. Really obnoxious character. I found the selfish mayor putting people's lives in danger more sympathetic than this guy. Imagine watching Jaws and you root for the shark because Brody is such a dick.

Anyway, once the flood starts the movie becomes more entertaining, although even that is limited by TV budget restrictions. The rest of the cast is solid, with Robert Culp my favorite. There's a subplot involving a bandana of his that I found more interesting than every single thing involving Milner's character.

Well, I recently got a hold of a used VHS tape, very cheap, with 2 disaster-of-nature flicks on it. I stumbled upon them on a flea-market and just took it home because of the cool cover-art (paintings of water/fire-disasters, not shown here on IMDb). So I sat down this afternoon and watched the first one on the tape, FLOOD! And I can say right away that the most exciting thing about this movie indeed was... the cover-art! And, yes, I know this is a 1976 made-for-TV movie, but still I expected quite a lot more from it and I feel like the film-makers could have done a lot better. The first 45 minutes of the movie are just too tedious. Sure, a lot of different characters are introduced, but they say or do nothing interesting at all. And what's even worse: Roddy Mcdowall's character gets introduced during the first scenes (apparantly he's a wealthy tourist on a fishing holiday), and after that, he never re-appears in the movie! The other main characters, basically just couples (husbands & wives and soon-to-be-married folks) have nothing else to do than to basically grab every opportunity to say "I love you" to one and other (over the phone, while meeting in a hospital,...). And naturally, there's this Brannigan-character (played by Robert Culp) running around warning everybody about the dam that's about to break, and of course nobody, especially the mayor (what did you expect?), believes him. I got somewhat excited when Barbara Hershey's name came up on the opening credits, but boy, did she portray one of the most disappointing female characters of the movie!

And when the dam finally breaks, it's just pretty pathetic. All you see, is some sort of wall of mud crumbling down. It doesn't even look like a dam. The one thing I really hoped for, was seeing some well-crafted miniatures of town-buildings getting flooded with river water. But nope. Nothing like that at all. One or two shots have some water running through a street (with easy-to-figure-out not-so-special-effects), some living rooms with water in them and a kid floating in a river holding on to a tree. And on top of that, we get several stock footage of real floods (mostly air-shots) which poorly match the main look of the film.

So, this really is a rather uneventful film, and the only thing you can say about it is that it's not particularly badly made and features OK acting. It's one of those movies you just might end up watching when it comes up on TV while you're 'zapping' channels and have absolutely nothing else to do. On the other hand, you might also keep on changing channels.

I suppose there are fans of disaster-movies out there, and they just might dig FLOOD! on some levels. I just got nothing out of it. I sure hope the other movie (FIRE!) on the tape is better.

Let's face it, we're all probably more than a little guilty at watching 'disaster movies' to see the scale of whatever carnage is being inflicted on our helpless protagonists. I don't want to spoil 'Flood!' but in this case a small town is being threatened by a plague of locusts from the future. Only kidding. It's a flood. Or rather a big dam just by their town and if it breaks - and it's already starting to crack - it'll flood the town and home insurance is going to go through the roof when it comes to the residents' next premium.

So we're introduced to the two men who have an idea as to what might happen and they try to warn the rest of the town. Or at least they try to warn the town's leader, who - in tried and tested stubborn style - refuses to believe them because if they drain the water from the dam it will impact on the revenue that fishing brings into their local economy.

So our heroes persist in their efforts to warn more people (in between popping home to their respective women who look about twenty years their junior, but that's another story). And then they go to a different location and warn a different person. In fact, most of the film is set in - very dry - houses with people talking to people about what might happen, i.e. The flood.

It's only the last twenty minutes or so where you see the actual flood. Now, maybe this pay-off is so awesome and ground-breaking that it makes the build up worth the wait? Sadly, this is a TV movie and there wasn't much of a budget for big practical effects, let alone an alien invasion with a skybeam.

So you have a film which is quite long and desperately wants to be an epic in its genre, but the lack of anything that really happens just makes most of it drag. Pity really, as it does have its charms and with a little more money behind it for the effects in the final act and a little less scenes building up, this could have been quite good.

Irwin Allen was the king of disaster movies. It's not a surprise that he would base one around a flood. The film was OK, but the disaster wasn't the main thrust of the film.

From the beginning, the story line revolves around Paul Blake (Martin Milner) trying to convince the mayor that the town dam was unsafe. Richard Basehart as the mayor did a good job in the mayor's role. Probably the best performance was given by Robert Culp as helicopter pilot Steve Branagan.

My main criticism is that for a film built around the disaster, the disaster itself seemed underplayed. Stock footage of floods (it was a TV movie, so probably not big FX budget), and a brief time for its depiction.

Watch for 70's teen idol Leif Garrett to have a small part in this.

I'm a fan of the genre, so I gave it a 6. Your mileage may vary.

Irwin Allen disaster movie about a flood.

Wonderful Richard LaSalle (Land Of The Giants) music scores the great location footage of the town and the endless helicopter footage. That is what Irwin Allen calls film showmanship. Irwin always gets the correct music for what is on the screen. Many producers do not.

In the first half of this movie Robert Culp (Outer Limits) and Martin Milner (Swiss Family Robinson) do wonders as they move around the town warning of disaster to come. Both actors perform very well. Richard Basehart is all wrong for this role of the man with something bad to hide, what was Irwin thinking by casting Basehart in this role? Poor old Whit Bissell is looking v-e-r-y old in 1976.

When the flood happens in the second half of the film, this is the problem area. We, the viewer, do not feel like we are watching a real flood. In 1977, Irwin Allen made another TV movie like this called "Fire", in that, the fire seemed real. In yet another 1979 Irwin TV movie "Cave-In", we had the Flood problem of a TV budget not being good enough for a disaster movie.

See Flood, just to get another taste of Irwin Allen showmanship, but don't expect too much.

Watched to see headliner Robert Culp who i had seen recently on Cold Winter's Death among other things and i liked it so decided to give this a go. Although Culp headlines, and the movie opens with him, he quickly falls back to play 2nd fiddle to Milner, who takes charge in making the townsfolk aware of the perilous situation, despite continued reassurances by Mayor Cutler, played by Richard Basehart, that the dam will hold as it always has before. While Milner does do a great job, zipping around town in a nerdy yellow second generation Ford Mustang, there isn't really enough going here to give this movie much oomph. Barbara Hershey is on board as Mayor Cutler's daughter in a somewhat muted role as a nurse at the hospital working under Dr. Ted Horne, played by veteran actor Walt Bissell. Carol Lynley stars in a bit part as the much younger and very pregnant wife Cameron Mitchell, who is in charge of plugging the dam holes and taking orders from Mayor Cutler. So the cast does offer some interest in itself, but none of the supporting cast really steps up and shines and Culp's performance, while not bad, is a bit disappointing.

I think the writing was bad in a couple of areas, especially with Hershey who could have done much more. Her odd relationship with Milner doesn't really help matters. Also the weirdest part was that of Roddy McDowall, who figures prominently in the credits. As the movie begins McDowall is being shuttled to his fish camp by Culp but never appears again. Parts must have been cut out. Hershey could have been more alluring and McDowell could have actually been on the movie would have made it a little more interesting maybe.

Rather than explore those possibilities much time is spent on the extremely familiar scenario of the young child Andy, lost and hurt, waiting to be rescued. I think we've all seen this on Lassie and every other old tv show. But anyway Flood is a fun watch. I enjoy these old tv movies from the 70's. Oh and Lief Erickson is on this movie.

Of the many producer and/or director figures in Hollywood, not many are known for being a "master" at something. Indeed, aside from Alfred Hitchcock, the unquestioned Master Of Suspense, Irwin Allen, for better or worse, will always be known as the Master Of Disaster. Although he had begun in the 1950's and continued on into the 1960's with extremely low-budget documentaries and the cult classic TV series "Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea", Allen remains known for being the one to put more all-star casts in extremis than maybe anyone else before today's mega-spectacle king Roland Emmerich. His 1972 production THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and the subsequent 1974 opus THE TOWERING INFERNO were the high watermarks of the much-derided disaster film genre of the 1970's, stressing big special effects and well-paid actors and actresses having to survive all manner of catastrophe. During 1976 and 1977, however, Allen went back to his TV roots to do a pair of (relatively) smaller scale disaster films, both of which aired on NBC. FLOOD was the first of these, airing on November 24, 1976.

In this film, the small Oregon mountain town of Brownsville is under imminent threat from its principal income source, a large but aging earthen dam where run-off from mountain rain has been flowing into the man-made lake behind the dam for thirty straight days. The strain on the dam is slowly but surely becoming progressively worse; and two of the townspeople (Martin Milner; Robert Culp) suggest that some of the water behind the dam be released into the emergency spillways to relieve the pressure on the structure. But they are running into stubborn and shady resistance from the mayor (Richard Basehart) who argues that the town's economy, based on the lake providing fishing and recreation, supercedes everything else. Even the dam's caretaker (Cameron Mitchell) is under pressure from Basehart to not open the spillways. Then things really start happening.

Much like Allen's other disaster films, not only does FLOOD involve a lot of stars trapped in a calamity that, in this case, is both a terrible creation of nature and human malfeasance, but it also involves a kind of "Enemy Of The People" situation in which greed and avarice eviscerate public safety. This is also a plot outline that was used by director Steven Spielberg in his 1975 masterpiece JAWS. This is by no means to say that FLOOD is on that level, or with the big-screen predecessors in Allen's portfolio; but even for a made-for-TV movie, the effects are good and the plot is credible, though some of the performances are a bit overripe for the cast that it has, including veterans Whit Bissell, Barbara Hershey, Roddy McDowall, and Carol Lynley, to name a few.

Veteran TV director Earl Bellamy, although basically a hired hand, does a fairly good job of keeping things on an even keel. This is no masterpiece; but for what it is, and especially given how similar situations have played themselves out in reality, notably the Oroville Dam crisis in Northern California in February 2017, it still is good.

Disaster movie mega-god, Irwin Allen takes his formula to the small screen with FLOOD! In it, a town is threatened by the wall of water of the title, due to a crumbling dam. Robert Culp plays helicopter pilot, Steve Brannigan, who first notices the problem.

Not-so shockingly, when Brannigan brings this to the attention of the powers that be, it's dismissed out of hand. Naturally, big money plays a key role in their disinterest.

In typical Allen fashion, the tension builds slowly, while the various characters bicker, and the dam continues to decay. This takes quite some time to really get going, making much of the 90 minute running time feel like sitting on a hot stove!

In reality, disaster films are monster movies, with fires, tidal waves, floods, and other calamities taking the place of the marauding behemoth. This isn't a terrible example of this. It just takes an eternity to get this monster going!

There is the expected all-star cast, including Roddy McDowall, Cameron Mitchell, Carol Lynley as an unnaturally huge pregnant woman, and Barbara Hershey as the world's hottest nurse. Also, watch for Leif Garrett, just before his teen heart-throb days...