When Time Ran Out

Or, as it should be known, When Time Ran Out... on the disaster film.

That's right. When Airport (1969) became a box office smash, it kicked off a decade-long boom in films where ageing Hollywood stars met their melodramatic deaths in elaborately staged set-pieces.

For a time, these films were a sure-fire recipe for blockbuster success. But as the Seventies wore on, audiences began to weary of their predictable formula and increasingly daft scenarios. And when this notoriously naff, volcano-themed piece of whimsy showed up, the whole genre finally blew-up like… well, a volcano.

Both a critical and commercial catastrophe, the movie stank at the box office and lost millions. It also ended careers. (Notably, one of its stars was so mentally scarred they never referred to it by name again.)

Surveying the devastation, Tinseltown bosses collectively pronounced the whole genre dead, and swore never again to make a film like When Time Ran Out (1980). 

The plot

When a volcano erupts on a pacific island, it looks very much like the glamourous guests at a nearby luxury hotel will be engulfed by molten magma. Yikes!

But fear not! For screen icon Paul Newman is on hand to save the day. With molten lava flowing down from all directions, Old Blue Eyes rallies a small group of survivors and leads them on a perilous journey to safety.

Naturally, this being a disaster movie, the escape is complicated by a pressing need from many characters to resolve a giddy mix of personal dramas. (Quite why no one can put off dealing with mom-didn’t-appreciate-me-enough until the crisis is over, is a mystery the genre has never resolved.)

With the island swiftly turning to liquid magma, the questions come thick and fast. Who will live? Who will die? And will the two old codgers harbouring a decades-old grudge tearfully reconcile in this moment of peril? At this point, you’d got to think there’s an outside chance they probably will.

When Time Ran Out…. On The Disaster Film

This movie’s reputation as a cinematic stinker is well deserved, and its problems - woeful special effects, lamentable soap opera sub-plots, listless action scenes – have been well documented.

So, rather than look at why this film is so bad, let’s to delve into how it came to be quite so awful.

When Contracts Ran Out

With Paul Newman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons and William Holden, When Time Ran Out boasts no fewer than four Oscar-winning actors.

So whatever its flaws, you wouldn’t think the acting would be an issue. And yet there’s a strange, dead-behind-the-eyes quality to each of their performances – almost as if they didn’t want to be there. Which, in fact, they didn’t.

You see, none of the garlanded Oscar worthies wanted to be anywhere near this merde-fest; they were all forced into it because of old contracts they’d signed. Newman later admitted it was the only film he ever regretted and refused to even mention its name, referring to it only as ‘that volcano movie’.

When Confidence Ran Out

You’d assume that such a major movie with an all-star cast and humungous budget would have top-notch director – so why was TV journeyman James Goldstone at the helm? The short answer: the studio was desperate to avoid giving the reins to the movie’s creator, Irwin Allen.

You might know Allen as the creative force behind such mega-hits as The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure. But by this time, his career had taken a double nose-dive – with the bad-cinema classic ,The Swarm, and soggy seafaring sequel Beyond The Poseidon Adventure – so Warner Bros insisted he not direct.

Allen’s answer? Hire a pliable stooge like Goldstone, who agreeably sat like a lump in the director’s chair while Allen sneakily pulled all the strings – and produced his third cinematic turkey in a row.

When Money Ran Out

Already buckling under the above challenges, the movie finally keeled over and died under the strain of constant studio budget cuts, which forced emergency (and often comedic) cost-saving measures.

So, if that tropical island looks a bit like California, that’s because…well, it’s clearly California. And the infamous special effects in the movie were straight out of Blue Peter. As a viewer, it’s hard to cower in the face of a terrifying volcano when it’s fashioned from an old washing-up liquid bottle and some cardboard tubes. You can almost see the sticky-back plastic.

Unsurprisingly, the end result was a truly terrible film. And while the pitiful box office takings were bad enough, the death knell of the entire disaster genre sounded just months later when Airplane! (1980), a scalpel-sharp dissection of disaster conventions and clichés, was a massive hit.

Exploding helicopter action

Given that destruction is at the heart of all disaster movies, it’s no surprise to learn that a helicopter ends up being an early casualty.

As magma rolls towards the luxury hotel, the panicked guests look a nearby helicopter for a quick escape. There’s a stampede, and people either cram themselves inside or cling desperately to the landing skids as it takes off.

Overloaded, the chopper struggles to remain airborne. Weaving around in the sky for a few moments, it suddenly plunges straight into a cliff and explodes. A case of When Copters Run Out.

Artistic merit

It’s a short and sweet scene: one moment the whirlybird is spinning around in the sky, the next it’s charging straight into a cliff.

The resulting fireball is rendered in far from convincing model-work. But rather than lingering, the camera sensibly cuts quickly to the horrified reactions of those that witnessed the crash.

On the plus side, the bunfight to get on the chopper is hugely enjoyable as those lucky enough to be inside kick and punch others trying to join them. Chivalry, it seems, is well and truly dead.

Exploding helicopter innovation

When Time Ran Out is not the only volcano-themed film to feature an exploding helicopter. Nearly twenty years later, a chopper in Dante’s Peak crashes after its engine becomes choked with volcanic ash.

Interesting fact

While the film lost money at the box office (it made just $4m against a $20m budget), it has gone on to make over $500m in the years since. Well, sort of.

That’s because Paul Newman used his fee from this financial disaster to launch Newman’s Own, his famous philanthropic range of salad dressings and sauces.

Review by: Jafo

The Last Match

Cliff Gaylor (Oliver Tobias) is a football player with an attitude. When his daughter Susan (Melissa Palmisano in her only screen credit) is framed and imprisoned for possessing illegal drugs while on vacation (in either a Caribbean or South American country, it’s never really made clear), Gaylor tries all the traditional channels to free her. 

First he goes to see the American Consul (Charles Napier, here credited as “American Consul”) but he’s useless. He then goes to see a local lawyer (Martin Balsam, credited as “Lawyer”), who is just as incapable. So Gaylor does the next natural thing: he calls his football coach (Ernest Borgnine, here credited as “Coach”. Sensing a pattern here?). 

Fired by can-do attitude, Borgnine promptly volunteers his entire football team to stage a commando raid on the prison. Of course, the whole team agrees and Coach “coaches” the mission by arming and training them in the usage of machine guns. All the team now need to do is get past sadistic prison warden Yashin (Henry Silva) and his underling prison guard. Will the team be able to punt, spike, blitz, sack, snap, and tackle their way towards reaching their (field) goal? Find out today!

The Last Match (1991) had a lot going for it: a strong cast, an amazing concept, and visually the sight of uniformed football players brandishing machine guns and grenade launchers looks awesome. Unfortunately, the movie only really kicks into high gear in the final third. 

Most of the movie is a staid and bland “my daughter’s in prison” drama with echoes of Midnight Express (1978). One thing Midnight Express did not have - unless we blinked and missed that part - is a bunch of crazed footballers on the rampage shooting machine guns at Henry Silva while Ernest Borgnine happily gives instructions through a headset. 

Ernest Borgnine calls the plays for the football
commandos final assault

Sadly, because of the rarity of this movie, most people haven’t gotten to see the cast of Borgnine, Balsam, Silva, Napier, and the footballers do their thing. Had this been released on VHS during the golden age of video stores, it might have had a shot at being a well-known cult movie. Instead, it’s just a not-so-well-known cult movie, which is only really justified by the last third.

That said there are some other noteworthy moments. There’s the strange “whosh-whosh” sound effects like someone’s waving a piece of cardboard in the air and a bizarre scene where Borgnine jovially recalls his wartime experiences. Other oddities include an evil drug dealer who has a shirt that simply says “NEWS”, and a subplot about saving an Elian-like kid from the third-world hellhole that is the unnamed country they’re trying to escape from. Also there’s a guy in the cast named Jim Kelly who’s a White guy and not the Jim Kelly we all know and love. 

So to recap, we’ve got unnamed characters, who are part of a football team that’s never named, running around an unidentified country. It really shouldn’t work. Yet somehow the silliness is pretty funny. 

Another good thing about the movie is that the whole “football commandos” idea is played completely straight. Where some filmmakers may have thought this a wacky or ironic idea – everyone here seems to think it was a perfectly sane concept for an action movie. And thank goodness for that. We get more than enough irony these days as it is. 

Fourth down and close quarters machine gun action

Just look at the training sequence where fully suited-up football players shoot machine guns at targets. That’s why we keep going back to these Italian productions. They always seem to deliver in some way, shape or form. But the fact that a quality idea like this didn’t really take off to its full potential shows that by 1991 things were starting to run out of gas. 

Much like Martin Balsam, who gives a bizarre, stuttering performance. Seated throughout he seems utterly confused as he reads his lines off a piece of paper. Compare that to Borgnine, who injects the movie with some much-needed energy during the interminable first and second portions. 

In the end, The Last Match has a killer concept, but ultimately doesn’t hit the mark. Or score a touchdown, if you will.

Still, there is one moment in the film where its bonkers premise fuses happily with the conventions of the action movie: the exploding helicopter scene. 

Our favourite moment occurs during the football team’s big assault on the baddies. A huge gun battle breaks out between the football commandos and the villains, who call in some rotor-bladed air support. 

Our heroes look like they might be in a sticky spot, but one of the team has a moment of inspiration. Splitting open a football, he packs a grenade inside, before punting it at the chopper. It’s a perfect kick and the football arrives at the helicopter just at the moment the grenade explodes, whereupon the leather ball and the whirlybird disappear in fiery oblivion.

Artistic merit

What can we say? This is a classic chopper fireball. Sure the effects are extremely ropey, but when we’ve just seen a man blow up a helicopter by volleying a grenade filled football at it, we’re not going to complain. We’re just going to sit back and enjoy the creativity, the imagination, not to mention the sheer lunacy of it. 

Exploding helicopter innovation

First use of an American football to blow-up a chopper. The trick has subsequently been repeated in Three Kings (1999) where Ice Cube attaches an explosive to a football before throwing it at a helicopter. 

Positives

You have to love the makers of this film for running with the concept and giving us appropriately football-themed chopper fireball.

Negatives

It might have been nice to see the wreckage fall to the ground or the pilot doing a classic “What the….” double-take. But like we said before, this no moment for petty grumbles.

Interesting fact

Director Fabrizio De Angelis has previous exploding helicopter form, having blown one up personally in Cobra Mission and overseen the destruction of another as producer on Cobra Mission 2.

This review is a guest post by our friends Brett and Ty from the great website Comeuppance Reviews. They're dedicated to celebrating action movies from the eighties VHS era. Check out their website and discover some forgotten gems. 

Codename: Wild Geese

Yee gods. The things we do for this website. Having slogged our way through the other two films in this loose trilogy the completist in us felt duty bound to watch Codename: Wild Geese (1984) in the hope of another exploding helicopter.

Despite the title, Codename: Wild Geese is not related to The Wild Geese or it’s sequel, erm Wild Geese II. It is in fact the first of three action films, all starring Lewis Collins and directed by Antonio Margheriti, that were knocked out in rapid order in the mid 80s. (The previously reviewed Commando Leopard (1985) and The Commander (1988) complete the triptych). 

Collins plays Captain Robin Wesley. He’s hired to lead a team of mercenaries into the Thai jungle to destroy an opium factory run by a corrupt army General.

Alongside Collins we have veteran character actor Ernest Borgnine as devious DEA agent and legendary German wild man Klaus Kinski as the enforcer for a shadowy Hong Kong businessman. 

But before the mission can start, Wesley must find a pilot. He uses the Government connection to arrange the release of 'China' (Lee Van Cleef) an ace pilot. 

The group head off up river into the jungle. They meet up with some rebels who lead them to the an army base where they plan to steal a helicopter they need to complete their mission.

After pinching the chopper, they fly to the corrupt general's drug factory. They launch their attack and destroy the labs. However, the small squad hits some trouble and Van Cleef is forced to leave his helicopter to help a wounded colleague.

However, in a pointless but convenient plot twist, one of the rebels who has accompanied them on the raid is a double agent. He sneaks up on the helicopter and, using the butt of his rifle, smashes the helicopter's fuel tank.

He retreats a few yards and sets fire to the petrol before one of Wesley’s men, realising the betrayal, shoots the rebel dead. Too late though, the helicopter is consumed in a fireball. Looks like our heroes will have to walk their way out the jungle.

Artistic merit

This is a poor helicopter explosion. The producers clearly couldn’t afford to actually blow a helicopter up, or even a realistic looking prop. Instead they set off some explosives which are clearly in front of the chopper.

When the smoke clears we can make out the tail end of a helicopter next to a burning fire. Quite where the rest of the helicopter has gone I don’t know. Maybe it evaporated?

Exploding helicopter innovation

Despite blowing up trains, bridges, laboratories, cars and trucks director Anthonio Margeriti never really expends any effort on blowing up helicopters in creative ways. It’s almost like he doesn’t think they’re worth the effort. How wrong can a man be?

Positives

There’s some good helicopter action at the end of the movie when Collins fixes a flame thrower on the runners of a requisitioned chopper. He then flies around the enemy’s jungle lair turning many of the villains to toast.

There’s also a good helicopter scene where Collins and the surviving members of his team are pinned down in a hanger with the helicopter they need to escape.

Kinski decides to use an old lorry to smash his way into the hanger driving it at doors to the building. Collins, knowing that the only chance of escape past the soldier outside will be to make a rapid exit from hanger, plants a box of grenades by the hanger doors.

With the helicopter revved up and ready to go he explodes the grenades destroying the doors to the hanger and allowing them to swoop out of the hanger just before the lorry smashes into the hanger and where the chopper was sat only moments before. It’s nice to see a bit of imagination used here.

Negatives

The scene where the helicopter’s fuel tanks are bust open with the butt of a rifle were a surprise. I can’t say if this is accurate or not, but it’s hard to believe that any chopper’s fuselage is made out of metal as flimsy as baking foil.

And if Lewis Collins is supposed to be the bad ass mercenary that he is, would he really pin his entire escape plan on a helicopter that could be taken out with blowpipe?

Favourite quote

“Are you ok?”
“We’re only screaming to scare them.”

Interesting fact

The film co-stars Ernest Borgnine, an exploding helicopter legend for this work in the TV series Airwolf. Borgnine was 67 when he made this. Unbelievably, he is still a working actor today at the grand old age of 94, appearing last year in the film RED.

Review by: Jafo

Still want more? Then read the review of the film by our buddies DTV Connoisseur or listen to our podcast episode on the film. Listen via iTunes, Sticher, Acast, Spotify or right here.