The Cassandra Crossing (George Pan Cosmatos, 1976)

I watched The Cassandra Crossing a few months ago on the strength of film scholar David Melville Wingrove's Facebook description of it as "[a] movie that transcends its own awfulness and becomes a perverse work of art." As you might suspect, it didn't live up to such hype. But I don't recall hating it either. The problem is I don't recall much at all about the thing, an increasingly frequent and frustrating reality for a film scholar of advancing years such as myself. So when the title came across my feed recently, I took it as a hint to revisit and pin down the film for good (if possible).

Turns out it's that most dreaded reminder of mortality - the okay movie. I'm baffled by the contemporary pans of the film which label it "an unintentional parody of a disaster film," "[a] sometimes unintentionally funny disaster film," and "so awful it's unintentionally hilarious." My experience clocks it as a solid thriller/disaster flick and little more. Sure, some of the performances from the all-star cast might be a tad overripe. But I see nothing to challenge Maria Montez's or Divine's status as queens of camp. And structurally, it's relatively straightforward, lacking the demented construction of, oh, Voyage of the Rock Aliens (James Fargo and Bob Giraldi, 1984). 

Three pieces of evidence support my conclusion. The Cassandra Crossing appears in neither Michael J. Weldon's The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983) (where such disaster movies d'estime as Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, and Rollercoaster sit proudly) nor his 1996 follow-up The Psychotronic Video Guide, thus weakening the film's trash profile. It enjoys a respectable but rather dispassionate 6.3/10 rating on IMDb. Most importantly, Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, that indispensable arbiter of the status quo, gives it three stars (out of four) and dispatches it in one indifferent sentence: "Entertaining disaster epic as train carrying plague approaches a weakened bridge" (220-221). Of course, camp, trash, and its myriad cousins result from acts of reception - one queen's so-good-it's-bad is another's meh. But this post commemorates the fact that I need never revisit this film again to determine its psychotronic verities. 

Whew! One down, 150,000 more films to go before I sleep.

Grade: B (downgraded a notch to prevent further viewing)