Shot four years before it actually aired, The Night the Bridge Fell Down is easily the least entertaining of producer Irwin Allen’s disaster pics made expressly for the tube. That said, I believe it is the only film — theatrical or televised — in his illustrious career in which a character is shown picking a booger from her nose and then rolling it between her fingers as if in consideration, before discarding it. This act is hardly the work of some corner-of-the-screen extra caught by the camera, but takes place in the foreground. Great decision, director Georg Fenady!

That’s about the only thing the movie has going for itself, although the requisite introduction of many soon-to-be-imperilled characters promises at least mild decency. There’s clean-scrubbed newlywed Johnny (Dezi Arnaz Jr., House of the Long Shadows), who robs a bank while his clueless wife (Char Fontane, 1989’s The Punisher) sits in the car, leafing through travel brochures. There’s Paul (City on Fire’s Leslie Nielsen, whose name is unceremoniously misspelled in the opening credits), a corrupt businessman juggling a feverish infant, a mistress (Barbara Rush, Can’t Stop the Music) and Xeroxed stolen bonds. There’s Terry (Eve Plumb, aka Jan of TV’s The Brady Bunch), a hair-impaired young woman who gets thee to a nunnery and, while home-delivering a freshly adopted orphan girl, cannot choose between love of the cloth or love for a cop (Richard Gilliland, Star Kid). There’s a Mexican landscaper (Gregory Sierra, Allen’s The Towering Inferno) who fulfills the telepic’s slot of “token minority.”

And then there’s city engineer Cal Miller (James MacArthur, Hang ’Em High), who declares something wrong with the Madison Bridge’s expansion joints after a third fatal accident occurs on its asphalt. Post-inspection, his dire, or-else warnings that the bridge needs to be shut down immediately fall on the deaf ears of a government bureaucrat (Boogie Nights’ Philip Baker Hall) whose secretary provides the aforementioned scene of nostril-spelunking. (A note, while we’re on the topic: Fenady also directed Allen’s Cave-In!)

Indeed, as the title makes clear, something does go wrong, 45 minutes in: Tremors in the earth chop the bridge off at both ends, stranding the above characters in a life-threatening situation that Johnny only worsens with his hothead and handgun, while Cal attempts rescue efforts from ground level. Every now and then, more pieces tumble to the water below, depicted via obvious miniatures. This Night’s biggest problem isn’t unconvincing effects, but sheer length, clocking in at a little over three hours. While Fenady and Allen managed to make Hanging by a Thread work just fine within that bloated sum, the idea-bereft Bridge shows wear. The last half could be titled The Night Viewers Learned Real-Time Lessons in Girder Climbing and Knot Tying, while the wire-strung climax comes straight from The Towering Inferno. On this smaller scale, the stakes simply aren’t high enough to justify it. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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

Get it at Amazon.

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.

Nearly a quarter-century before he famously dared Washington, D.C. to pry his rifle “from my cold, dead hands,” Charlton Heston tried to separate a sniper from his weapon of choice in the sports-world thriller Two-Minute Warning. Talk about a political flip-flop!

In his fourth disaster film (following Skyjacked, Airport 1975 and Earthquake), Heston stars as Capt. Peter Holly, in charge of the LAPD’s plan to foil a gunman’s plot to open fire on the L.A. Memorial Coliseum’s crowd assembled for a championship football game. Perched atop a scoreboard and in preparatory mode, the sniper (Warren Miller, Married to the Mob) is glimpsed first by the camera blimp overhead. Cops are alerted, and enter Holly and SWAT Sgt. Button (John Cassavetes, Rosemary’s Baby). The two talk strategy and mention no fewer than three times the unfortunate maintenance man who got “butt-stroked off the ladder.”

The sniper’s target? Oh, just about 100,000 pigskin fans, but to guess who will bite the bullet(s), place your bets on the bleachers’ numerous famous faces, including Walter Pidgeon (Forbidden Planet) as a pickpocket, Jack Klugman (TV’s Quincy, M.E.) as a gambler and Beau Bridges (Max Payne) as a hothead father who slaps the shit out of his young son for revealing Dad’s employment status (read: not) to the pennant salesman. Playing themselves are Howard Cosell, Frank Gifford, Merv Griffin and Andy Sidaris, then an Emmy-winning sports director vs. the Russ Meyer of action flicks he would become.

Per disaster-genre regulations, director Larry Peerce (1989’s Wired) continuously revisits the dozen or so subplots like so many spinning plates. It’s tough to tire of a film that walks that tightrope in double time. It is easy, however, to tire of Two-Minute Warning’s maddeningly repetitive musical cue. I forgive Peerce for dropping the needle on it so often, because the eventual melee triggered by the villain’s squeezed trigger is a smorgasbord of fallen (and falling) spectators. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Based on the evidence that is The Break-In, we may assume that do-it-all filmmaker Justin Doescher saw Paranormal Activity — and perhaps even one or more of its sequels — and said aloud to himself, “Heck, I can do that!”

But he cannot. The Break-In is a rank-amateur, found-footage thriller that deserves to stay lost.

Built upon the flimsy-even-for-fiction premise that Jeff Anderson (Doescher, who also wrote, directed and produced) has a cool new phone and feels the need to record his every move, the movie presents itself as a week’s worth of police evidence. With a rash of recent burglaries plaguing the neighborhood, Jeff installs a security system to better protect his fiancée, Melissa (Maggie Binkley), and their unborn child. Cameras keep tabs on exactly four rooms: the kitchen, the bedroom, the living room and the “lounge room” (known to the rest of the civilized world as “a lounge”).

Whenever the movie’s POV shifts away from Jeff and his goddamn phone (not often enough) and to these security cams, the screen denotes which room we’re looking at, presumably in case viewers are unable to process obvious visual cues that a bed indicates a bedroom; a refrigerator means a kitchen; and so on. But mostly, The Break-In is Jeff yammering away as he eats dinner, shops for a crib, takes out the recycling — you know, the special moments to preserve for Baby!

Whether he is by himself or with “my boy”/best friend/next-door neighbor/fellow athletics-obsessed meathead man-child Steve (J.P. Veizaga, 10 Rules for Sleeping Around); with Melissa, who applies glitter to her eyelids, yet works as a teacher and not a stripper; or with the buzz-cut Det. Garcia (Ted Fernandez, at once the standout performer and the screen’s least convincing police detective), Jeff records it all.

The way in which Doescher tells his story is maddening: He speaks all the exposition, as if he were reading stage directions from a script. Despite the writer’s axiom of “show, don’t tell,” Doescher figures, “Hey, why not both?” In essence, he narrates actions that need no narration, shares information that needs no sharing and, most damning, externalizes his internal thoughts, as if he does not trust his audience to know that, for example, seeing Melissa stretching in workout clothes and sunglasses on the front porch suggests that a run either has happened or is about to happen.

And to say anything “happens” in the no-budget microindie is being awfully kind. On occasion, we get a glimpse of some mysterious figure in the corner of the frame or far in the background, yet what all that leads up is no mystery: It’s right there in the title! How a found-footage project possibly could capture a dream sequence, however, there’s your mystery.

Many a found-footage film falls flat, but The Break-In usurps the likes of The Gallows and 8213: Gacy House as the subgenre’s worst. If a sports bar could make a movie, the result would be The Break-In. And yet it’s all out of cheese fries, so what’s the point? —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.