BALEFUL BRATZ: Disaster Movie Kids.....
Jill and Robin set the gold standard by which other disaster movie kids are judged. Many were called, but few met the challenge....
AIRPORT 1975. Linda Blair plays JANIS, a little girl kidney transplant patient who is being flown to her donor organ. Yeah, I know, usually it works the other way around, but in a film where a man is lowered yo-yo style from one plane to another thru a gaping hole in the fusilage and horny hetero pilots talk about how great 137 year old Gloria Swanson looks, why question? Janis beams incessantly and says things like "This is so EXCITING! People are so INTERESTING!"
That's cause she hasnt talked to the other kid on the flight. Airline official George Kennedy has a wife and son aboard. His wife seems like a frazzled tranquilizer chugger, and his son is one of those creepy 12 year olds who look exactly as they will when they are 40. He talks incessantly about dull tourist traps, and when it is announced that the plane will land at Salt Lake city, he gets excited at the thought of seeing the Tabernacle. He lives. So, too, does Janis and SURPRISE! somehow they found a donor organ for her in Salt Lake City!
On the TAMMY SCALE, Janis is about a 4. On the ROBIN SCALE, Creepy twelve year old is a 9.
EARTHQUAKE features Corey, the son of Genevieve Bujold's character, who looks like the kid you always wanted to belt back in school. He doesnt do much except ride his bike. For the first 2 hours of the movie we periodically see him, friendless (no surprise) riding his bike. THEN, a footbridge which looks like it was built by kids who tired of building treehouses collapses, pitching Corey into a dry flash-flood channel. Heis unconscious, electric wires dance around him, and he is saved at the last possible second as the flood bears down on him.
He is low on the ROBIN SCALE. His plotline is so pointless and dull that one wonders why it waasnt edited out.
TOWERING INFERNO. Featured two kids, one of whom was Bobby from the Brady Bunch. He wears a way-cool 1974 headset radio that, apparently, renders him deaf to things like fire alarms, explosions, agonized screams from the next room, and the telephone. He has a sister with no discernable personality traits. Jennifer Jones has to rescue the two kids, spends half the film's running time (9 hours) walking them upstairs to the Grand Ballroom, and is repaid for her heroism with a death plunge from the Great Glass Elevator. Bobby Brady survives, dammit.
On the ROBIN SCALE, Bobby Brady is a ten out of ten. He was the Brady kid you always wanted to see die in a VERY SPECIAL EPISODE, and it prejudices you against the character in this film. The running gag about the heasdsets rendering him oblivious to A-bomb like explosions doesnt help.
His sister is all but invisible. She is a zero on the TAMMY SCALE.
THE SWARM. Lil Timmy's family gets swarmed to death at a picnic. He survives and attempts vengeance against the bees...he and his friends go to THE FATAL HOLLOW TREE and attempt to kill the bees. They bring garbage cans to hide under, and so survive their botched effort to kill the bees. The bees kill their entire hometown and, eventually, the entire cast of the first half of the film (including them) and a bit later the state of Texas.
Lis TIMMY is a 9 out of 10 on the ROBIN SCALE. His stupidity kills an entire state. He'd be a 10 out of 10, but I subtracted a point because his actions led directly to the death of Olivia deHavilland's character.
deHavilland plays a gracious old lady school teacher with two beaux. She glows with contentment and graciousness, and hambones mercilessly in a VERY 1940s acting style. One of her beaux is seen running along a street in slo-mo, surrounded by swirling coffee grounds. THEN, her student body is stung to death on the playground, by angry coffee grounds, as she watches thru a window and acts and acts and acts. Fred McMurray wins the love battle, but then one scene later the entire cast is killed when the bees run a refugee train off a cliff. deHavilland and McMurray both presumably die, but if it is any consolation the nuclear blast would have killed them anyway, had the train not been wrecked.
TITANIC. Norman. Love child love child never quite as good. He's an annoying little gentleman sort...one suspects that he will grow up to be an adult who demands to be spanked for his sins... and you know that he is moron enough to remaion behind with the father who rejected him. His sister is irritating, too...and his sister's song singing, Rag dancing, all American beau is worse than the other two put together. Norman is an 8 on the ROBIN SCALER OF ANNOYANCE, his sister reminds me of Jill at 16 and so gets a 7 on the JILL SCALE, and her suitor gets a 15 out of 10 on the ROBIN chart, with five extra points being given for NAVAJO RAG.
ROLLERCOASTER. Oh my. Timothy Bottoms plays a psycho who blows up rollercoaster. George Segal plays the investigator who plays Zodiac Killer cat and mouse games with the psycho. NOW, the plot gets good. The greatest rollecoaster ever is about to open, we'll call it the Bowel Loosener, and its a sure bet that Psycho Mn will blow it up. Given that, you'd think that when Segal, who knows more about the case than anyone, tells his daughter (Helen Hunt) and her stepmother (Susan Strasberg) "Dont go near Squalid Acres Amusement Park TODAY," they'd listen. Two seconds after he leaves the house:
HUNT: Can we go to Squalid Acres?
STRASBERG; Sure!
All but guaranteeing that they will be lined up to be victims of the nefarious bomber. Segal runs into them in the park, and tells them "DONT GO ON THE BOWEL LOOSENER" and three seconds after he leaves:
HUNT: Can we go on the Bowel Loosener?
STRASBERG: SURE!
Yes, they live. Not only that, but they are on the ride when it runs over Timothy Bottoms and cuts his head off.
For playing the stupidest teenager in the history of disaster films, Hunt gets a 10 on the TAMMY SCALE.
