The hit disaster movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “Purely and simply a wretched failure”
Hollywood loves few things more than capitalising on a trend before proceeding to run it into the ground as quickly as possible, and in the 1970s, few things were hotter than the blockbuster disaster movie. Roger Ebert enjoyed quite a few of them, but there was one he completely and utterly abhorred.
On paper, it was a simple, if expensive, proposition for a major studio. Ask a screenwriter to conjure a natural or man-made event of cataclysmic proportions, funnel millions of dollars into hiring a heavyweight cast and developing the latest cutting-edge special effects, then sit back and watch the money roll in.
Of course, they’d all be good if it were that simple, or at least half-decent, which wasn’t the case. For every The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure that drafted in A-list stars, rinsed the box office, and competed for Academy Awards, there were dismal disaster flicks like The Swarm, Meteor, and even sequels like Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and two of the latter three starred the unfortunate Michael Caine.
There was one picture that became a rousing success on two continents, albeit after passing through the hands of Roger Corman, and Ebert was aghast at the Americanised version. Shiro Moritani’s Submersion of Japan was such a phenomenon that it was the highest-grossing release in Japan in both 1973 and 1974, earning twice as much from local cinemas as its nearest competitor.
Instead of simply re-releasing a proven commodity for English-speaking audiences, Corman bought the rights, removed great swathes of footage, hired a brand new director to helm additional sequences, brought in a whole cast of American actors to populate it, and rebranded it as Tidal Wave.
It can’t be said it didn’t work when the wonky Frankenstein that emerged on the other side earned further millions in the United States, even if Ebert was so thoroughly unimpressed that he awarded a meagre half-star in a withering review that started as it meant to go on: “Bad movies are really getting awful these days.”
The critic wasn’t a snob about broad B-movies, and he admitted to being “heartened by the sight of the staples holding together the cardboard skyscrapers.” Ebert was hoping that Tidal Wave would enter the realm of movies “so terrible they achieved a sort of greatness,” but the opposite was true.
“It is purely and simply a wretched failure,” he wrote. “A feeble attempt to paste together inept special effects (filmed in Japan) and Lorne Greene (filmed in America to his everlasting regret, I’ll bet).” If it wasn’t clear from the title, the movie does indeed revolve around the oncoming threat of a wave that threatens to reduce the Japanese coastline to rubble, which was standard for the subgenre.
Ebert was hoping for a healthy slice of cheese, washed down with suitably preposterous special effects, but neither box was ticked. Instead, it was cliche after cliche, and not even in a fun way. Whether he’d seen or was even aware of Submersion of Japan is unknown, but what’s abundantly clear is that he hated what happened to the picture after Corman had gotten his hands on it.
