When Time Ran Out (1980)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Hank Anderson	Paul Newman
Kay Kirby	Jacqueline Bisset	½
Shelby Gilmore	William Holden	½
Brian	Edward Albert	½
Francis Fendly	Red Buttons
Iolni	Barbara Carrera
Rose Valdez	Valentina Cortese	½
Nikki Spangler	Veronica Hamel
Tiny Baker	Alex Karras
Rene Valdez	Burgess Meredith	½
Tom Conti	Ernest Borgnine
Bob Spangler	James Franciscus	½
Mona	Sheila Allen
Sam	Pat Morita

Review

After crashing out with Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, Irwin Allen assembled a band of his old companions and made a final, desperate attempt at milking the disaster cow by essentially rehashing as many of the original ideas from The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno as possible. The result is a full-fledged fiasco that Leonard Maltin fittingly dubbed "When Ideas Ran Out", because not only are many of the character-relations and plot-developments in the convoluted script feeble attempts at recreating the magic from the two aforementioned films, but Paul Newman and William Holden actually play downright carbon copies of their characters from The Towering Inferno. Then there's Red Buttons and Ernest Borgnine playing some kind of... people (Borgnine is lucky enough to wear a blindfold for most of the film), whereas all the women are one generic blob of screaming, paralysed meat puppets. Needless to say, Irwin Allen was effectively outdated after this, and he never made another feature film. Oh, and did I mention that the action set-pieces (the few there is) are so inane and excruciatingly slow-moving that you start rooting for the volcano? Or that the special effects are remarkably amateurish, since Allen spent all of his money on actors and location shooting? The only redeeming quality here is the useful intro, but by the end of When Time Ran Out, the disaster genre had effectively committed suicide and would not resurrect for almost twenty years.