TERROR ON THE 40th FLOOR
Just call it Die Hard: With A Fire
This one found its way into the horror section seemingly by virtue of having the word "terror" in the title!
You know how TV networks have a strange habit of pounding out a cheap knockoff of a major blockbuster (or would-be blockbuster) that's released around the same time? Like how Twister was preceded (by about a week) by Tornado! and Godzilla by Gargantua. Anyway, it looks like this was done even 25 years ago, and thus was this with The Towering Inferno.
Also known as The Blazing Tower, it's poorly written, shoddily made, not to be seen except by the self-flagellating. Back in the days before sprinkler systems (not to mention fire hoses made of material that wouldn't burn), a group of Christmas Eve revelers in some unnamed city stay at the party after it was supposed to have been closed down. So just when the entire building is supposedly empty, a big fire erupts in the basement, which creeps its way up from floor to floor, threatening one and all with flame, smoke, and death!
Man, is this put together hack-iliciously. The flashbacks to each character's everyday lives and the unfinished emotional business they'll leave if they don't make it home are just painful. A television anchorman keeps popping up to tell us things that either don't matter or we've already figured out - again and again and again. And check out this dialogue: "Now I see that we've got to make a choice. A) We can wait here like frightened animals, cringing in the corner, until we're dead from suffocation, or B) we can try to save ourselves."
Watching this building go up is about as exciting as looking into a campfire without any of that weird "I'm mesmerized by the coals" thing that always happens to me. It sucks quite a bit - but one childhood memory is enough to keep me from completely booting it off to the netherworld of total crap. I remember commercials for a televised showing of The Towering Inferno, and they absolutely scared the crap out of me. I didn't see the movie itself until last year, but hot damn, did those ads ever scare me as a kid. I didn't like going up into high rises at all until I was about fifteen.
Just sucks. The box art shown at the IMDb contains the tag line "TRAPPED IN A BURNING INFERNO!", as if there were another kind of inferno. If you're lucky, you?ll see it on the shelf next to Terror At The Opera. Rent that instead.