The Strangest Disaster Movies Ever Made

Since the beginning of film, there have been disaster movies. Early silent movies were filled with floods, fires, and assorted cinematic calamities. In the 1970s, the remarkable success of Airport kicked off a decade of disasters; earthquakes, towering infernos, additional airports, Poseidon adventures, oh my. After a fallow period, they came roaring back in the ’90s, with aliens blowing up the White House, competing killer asteroid and volcano films, plus loads of twisters — or technically just one Twister. (Twisters wouldn’t arrive in theaters for another 30 years or so.)

Most genres go through cycles of popularity but the enormous swings between its peaks (or Dante’s peaks, if you will) speaks volumes about disaster movies. Namely: They are tough to get right. Once you’ve flipped a cruise ship or smashed a locomotive, how do you top it? Disaster movies tend to work best when they’re not too big, and when the focus can remain at least somewhat on the human characters and the emotional and psychological toll left by these tragedies. But audiences continually demand bigger thrills, which leads to bigger (and often more convoluted) disasters, which can throw the whole balance of elements out of whack.

When that happens, you wind up with movies like the ones below, 12 of the weirder disaster movies from throughout a history, that has been nearly as tumultuous as a flood and as rocky as an avalanche — if not Flood! and Avalanche. They feature increasingly ludicrous disasters befalling increasingly oddball casts of Hollywood stars and random celebs. They are very strange — and sometimes, I must admit, perversely compelling.

READ MORE: Why People Still Love the Original Twister