The 20 cheesiest disaster movies of all time

John Cusack drives a limousine through a collapsing office building in this end-of-the-world corker from Irwin Allen’s heir apparent, Roland Emmerich. Lots of other really dumb stuff happens before and after this sequence, but it’s the moment when this shamelessly stupid movie either shakes you off or wins you over. The film was timed to capitalize on the Mayan calendar’s prophecy of an apocalyptic event in the titular year. Looks like they were off by a half-decade.

At some point during the 1970s, people got really worked up over killer bees. The short version: the bees were introduced to South America in the 1950s, and then began to spread like wildfire through Central America and into Mexico. It was just a matter of time before they invaded the U.S., at which point only Michael Caine would be able to save us. This Irwin Allen production was a pricey bomb in 1978, and marked the beginning of the end of his successful run as the “Master of Disaster.”

“Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.” If you love “Airplane!” you owe it to yourself to see “Zero Hour!,” the 1957 aerial disaster flick from which it lifts liberally and often verbatim. The plot is virtually identical: a guilt-ridden ex-fighter pilot is recruited from coach class to land a commercial airliner when both of its pilots are felled by food poisoning. There’s even a former pro athlete, Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch, in the cockpit!

Terrorists attempt to bomb the U.S. office at the International Health Organization in Geneva, and wind up exposed to a highly contagious virus. One of the assailants manages to board a nearby passenger train stocked with an all-star cast, and it’s a race against time to quarantine the sick and outsmart the nefarious U.S. government. The unintentionally hilarious highlights are Richard Harris playing the world’s toughest neurosurgeon, Ava Gardner making time with a young Martin Sheen and O.J. Simpson as a priest (it turns out he’s an undercover agent for the FBI).

Forty-one years after Universal Studios unleashed “the big one” on Los Angeles in “Earthquake,” New Line Cinema upped the ante by laying waste to the entire California coastline. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson plays an air rescue pilot for the Los Angeles Fire Department who repeatedly leaves countless innocent people to die so he can focus on saving his estranged wife (Carla Gugino) and daughter (Alexandra Daddario). There are multiple quakes and a mega-tsunami, but the real fun is in adding up the body count caused by The Rock’s selfish indifference.

What if it’s not a major earthquake that Los Angeles should fear, but rather a volcano under the La Brea Tar Pits? It’s a question no one had thought to ask before this goofy disaster flick (the second volcano movie of 1997 after “Dante’s Peak”) but, at a bracingly entertaining 104 minutes, you’re glad they did. John Carroll Lynch is the MVP as an MTA official who sacrifices himself by jumping into a flow of lava. It’s a fun L.A. movie, too; the volcanic mayhem melts Dennis Woodruff’s car and sets one of Angelyne’s billboards ablaze.

What “Airplane!” didn’t lift from “Zero Hour!” it took from “Airport 1975,” the sequel to the Best Picture-nominated “Airport” – which is odd because the film seems at times to be spoofing itself. Charlton Heston plays the hero, a rescue pilot who’s lowered from a helicopter into the crippled cockpit of a 747. The movie’s got a deep comedy bench of Sid Caesar, Larry Storch, Jerry Stiller and Norman Fell. Helen Reddy, of “I Am Woman” fame, plays the nun who sings to a sick girl in need of a kidney transplant. Thankfully, she doesn’t knock out the poor thing's IV.

Producer Roger Corman evidently watched the fake “That’s Armageddon” trailer from “Kentucky Fried Movie” and decided to make a real movie out of it. Rock Hudson plays a wealthy developer who courts disaster by building a ski resort in a precariously deforested area of the Rocky Mountains. Hudson repeatedly ignores warnings of an impending avalanche from an environmentally conscious photographer (Robert Forster), and gets a load of people killed in the process. The visual effects are terrible, as is the film. It’s an unintentional laugh riot from start to finish, though you can’t help but feel awful for Mia Farrow, who looks sheepish in every scene as Hudson’s imperiled ex-wife.

“You’re not interested in what happened to the bees?” Mark Wahlberg plays a science teacher trying to make sense of a baffling environmental phenomenon that causes people to kill themselves. Why? Because the bees disappeared, that’s why. This unintentional howler from M. Night Shyamalan plays like the kind of disaster Rod Serling would’ve made had he suffered severe brain damage and continued to drink heavily against doctor’s orders. Fix yourself a lemon drink, pull up a chair and enjoy the stupid. 

A massive car wreck in New York City’s Holland Tunnel blocks both exits, trapping a group of commuters under the Hudson River with a rapidly diminishing supply of breathable air. Fortunately for them, emergency services stud Kit Lataura (Sylvester Stallone) is stuck between Manhattan and New Jersey with them. “Daylight” is a little bit “Towering Inferno” and a little bit “Cliffhanger,” and does feature impressive production design. But it grows increasingly silly as the filmmakers invent implausibly dangerous rescue scenarios for Stallone to overcome.

Irwin Allen produced this made-for-TV catastrophe about a small Oregon town that gets submerged after the local dam breaks due to a long stretch of heavy rain. Given the limited television budget, Allen skimps on the effects, leaning heavily on stock flood footage for spectacle. The result is a cheap-looking hoot that gets a lot of character actors (Carol Lynley, Cameron Mitchell and Richard Basehart) soaking wet. It’s worth watching for the odd casting alone: Barbara Hershey, Robert Culp and teen heartthrob Leif Garrett are also thrown into the deluge.

This was a disaster film in more ways than one for American International Pictures. Though production costs were split with the Hong Kong-based Shaw Brothers, the film’s total failure basically killed AIP. “Meteor” finds the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union pressing pause on the Cold War to aim their nuclear missiles at a massive rock hurtling toward the Earth. Director Ronald Neame made a disaster film classic in “The Poseidon Adventure,” but he’s got nothing to work with here. Fortunately, the relentlessly serious tone produces no shortage of purely accidental laughs (though it’s tough watching Sean Connery and Natalie Wood look so utterly miserable).

This movie is certifiably insane. A massive storm causes a commercial airliner to crash land in the ocean. They’re rescued by a tour boat, but water and food eventually run out; as sharks begin to circle the vessel, the passengers (including Carroll Baker, Arthur Kennedy and Lionel Stander, the classy man’s Ernest Borgnine) are forced to eat a small dog and, eventually, each other to survive. It’s a brutal and brutally stupid movie with an incongruously funky score that would be right at home in an adult film.

Irwin Allen’s “Master of Disaster” magic had definitely run out by the time he reunited with Paul Newman, the star of his Best Picture nominee “The Towering Inferno,” for this box office dud. An active volcano is about to erupt all over a luxury resort, and it’s a race against time to evacuate the guests. Newman and the resort’s owner William Holden are the voices of reason, while Holden’s greedy partner, James Franciscus, assures the guests everything will be okay. The $20 million budget must’ve gone entirely to the A-list cast because the visual effects are uproariously lousy.

What happens when the Earth’s core stops rotating? Well, you either wait to get baked by solar radiation or you throw Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank and a few other familiar faces in a deep-drilling vessel to bore down to the planet’s core, where you set off some nukes to get that sucker spinning again. It plays as ridiculous as it sounds, but the cast is game (especially Stanley Tucci as an eccentric scientist), and the effects are surprisingly top notch. “The Core” knows it’s silly, and that’s part of the fun.

The baffling ellipsis in the title is a warning: nothing in this movie adds up. The fourth and final installment in the “Airport” franchise brings back George Kennedy as Captain Joe Patroni, who’s now one of the pilots of the luxury supersonic passenger jet, the Concorde. The film is riddled with implausible sights (e.g. Patroni shoots a flare gun out of the cockpit window), but nothing strains credibility more than the chunky Kennedy seducing Swedish beauty Bibi Andersson.

Seven years after scoring $127 million at the box office and racking up nine Academy Award nominations with “The Poseidon Adventure,” Irwin Allen returned to the luxury liner for an action film that hinges on salvage rights. Michael Caine’s group has a legitimate claim, while Telly Savalas’s crew are the bad guys looking to make their own score. The plot requires these folks to get trapped in the capsized boat and escape again. Somehow, Allen was able to lure Sally Field, then one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood, onto this leaky vessel.

Universal Pictures put a novel spin on the disaster flick formula when they took aim at the growing popularity of amusement parks and rollercoasters with this Sensurround spectacle. The film promised oodles of derailment mayhem elevated by a dash of Hitchcockian suspense with its mad-bomber plot. The extortion storyline is too silly to be taken seriously, but you’re not watching for elaborate twists and turns; you’re here to see rollercoasters fly off the tracks into food stands. In that regard, the movie delivers.

The characters in “Twister” were stupid, but the first-rate cast got us on their thrill-seeking wavelength; we didn’t want to be them, but we didn’t mind being in their company. The folks in this “Twister” knock-off are fence-post dumb, and mostly played by mostly charmless actors. Worse, the film employs a found-footage gimmick that requires them to keep shooting the action while they’re in mortal danger. The tornados have more emotional depth.

Paul W.S. Anderson seems to believe he’s found his “Gladiator” and his “Titanic” in this historical disaster epic set against the early A.D. eruption of Mount Vesuvius. He’s found nothing of the sort, but his deathly serious commitment to the material yields nonstop laughs as it builds toward its calamitous climax. Emily Browning and Kit Harrington are dull as the love-struck leads, but Jared Harris, Carrie-Anne Moss and Kiefer Sutherland serve up some tasty, heavily glazed ham.