Just as Final Destination 2 would 25 years later, the Hanna-Barbera production The Beasts Are on the Streets begins on the highway, introducing us to various passengers in a handful of vehicles in such a way that you know a very bad wreck is about to be in effect. Sure enough, in a fit of road rage, two rednecks in a truck cause a tanker driver off the asphalt and into the fence of a safari park, immediately flooding Highway 417 with zebras, ostriches, bison, camels, bears, panthers and elephants, as if they were all waiting patiently by one particular section of gate to be taken down.

The deadlier animals try to get into cars to retrieve the human snacks inside. One dumb guy, ignoring all advice to the contrary, leaves the safety of his automobile, only to practically be raped by a tiger for doing so. But what about the zoo’s star attraction, the king of the jungle? As a particularly awful TV news personality reports live from the scene, “There’s no word on that famous lover lion, Renaldo.” Suspense!

For this disaster-minded take on the Ivan Tors family comedy Zebra in the Kitchen, one-time 007 director Peter Hunt (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) follows the efforts of park employees — played notably by disaster-pic staple Carol Lynley (Flood), fresh from pulling a baby camel from its mother’s vagina, and a pre-Miami Vice Philip Michael Thomas — to round up God’s creatures great and small from all over town, and return them unharmed to caged living. Running amok as nature intended, the poor things just wanted to get turnt — instead, they get tranq’d.

Pre-PETA, Beasts’ wild and wooly treatment of its four-legged cast members only adds to its watchability (a dune buggy careening downhill comesthisclose to mowing down a rhino). Don’t think the two-legged actors got off easy, either; the movie seems to radiate the kind of questionable crowd safety (in particular, watch for the toddler who is yanked up by his arm in a throng of panicked picnickers) filmmakers couldn’t get away with today — not that the networks make this kind of ready-for-prime-time schlock anymore. —Rod Lott

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You’re a talented metallurgical engineer. (Just go with me here.) You’re blowing the whistle on your bosses for defrauding the federal government and putting troops’ lives at risk. You’re told you’re a dead man for doing so. You’re set to testify against them in mere days. You’re under witness protection. You’ve already survived one attempt on your life via the ol’ “phony mail carrier with a gun” routine. And yet you purposely leave the safe house to attend a previously scheduled picnic with friends and family, in public.

You, sir, are a goddamn idiot who deserves to eat lead.

However, producer Irwin Allen, never met a patently absurd setup he could not milk for a telefilm buck. And after fires, floods and rock slides, the Master of Disaster was down to arguably his most incredulous concept yet: being stuck in a cable car. Ladies and gentlemen, you are Hanging by a Thread.

The trouble begins when engineer Paul Craig (Sam Groom, Deadly Eyes) decides to ditch the protective care of the feds — by himself, by his own choice and for the night so he may accompany his son, Tommy (Michael Sharrett, Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend), on a private picnic atop a mountain accessible only via aerial tram. Not happy to see Paul show up is his ex-wife, Ellen (Donna Mills, Allen’s Fire); in turn, Paul is not happy to see her being pawed by his old friend, Alan (Bert Convy, The Cannonball Run), to whom Ellen is now engaged. The members of this love triangle — and the other eager picnickers (one played by Valley of the Dolls’ Patty Duke) — were such perennial partiers, they formed their own WASPs’ nest, called the Uptowners’ Club.

Being a fatuous, wealthy douche who lives to show off and bend others to his bank-enabled will, Alan gives the go-ahead to board the tram, despite a doozy of an approaching thunderstorm. Wouldn’t you know it, lightning strikes the cables and fries some metal doohickey, effectively stranding the group approximately 7,500 in the air. With high winds preventing copter rescue, the plot pits Paul against Alan in a race to nut up and Be a Hero, Just for One Day. Although we’re barely an hour into this three-hour-plus armchair gripper, Paul handily wins, because Alan’s alcoholism gets the *hic!* better of him; rather than take swift action, Alan takes increasingly larger swigs from a heretofore hidden flask as big as his head.

So how do vowel-deprived director Georg Fenady (Cave In!) and scripter Adrian Spies (The Ordeal of Patty Hearst) fill the time before Paul inevitably saves the day? If you guessed “play Win, Lose or Draw,” I like where your head’s at, but you’re eight years off. The answer: flashbacks, natch! Each adult gets his or her turn to mentally turn back the clock and revisit closeted skeletons such as framing a family member for corporate malfeasance, coveting thy neighbor’s wife and that time they got so shit-faced, they murdered Doug Llewelyn of TV’s People’s Court. Now that was a party!

And so is Hanging by a Thread, even with so many signs suggesting otherwise: specifically, the daunting running time, the cockamamie concept and all that Convy. Yet as the soap bubbles and bubbles to a fine moisturizing lather, the made-for-TV movie gets by on its sheer unhipness and the surprisingly strong work from Groom. When at the end, the brakeless car careens downward toward the starting point and an uncertain fate for all involved (bringing new meaning to the phrase “exit through the gift shop”), I’ll admit I felt my toes tense just a tad — like Speed with flared collars, dumber characters and a better view. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.