I had to think it was a bad sign when I couldn’t get Lionel Richie’s song, “Dancing on the Ceiling” out of my head while watching NBC’s remake of “The Poseidon Adventure.”
The characters in this modern TV remake of an already silly premise are not so much dancing as they are fighting for their lives.
But when the SS Poseidon cruise ship capsizes, up becomes down and down becomes up in a matter of minutes. That was when it hit, and I just failed to shake Richie’s classic line, “Oh, what a feelin’, when we’re dancin’ on the ceilin’!”
Is that wrong? Actually, no.
This made-for-TV flick is worse than most. And that’s saying something.
“The Poseidon Adventure,” a waste of three hours that starts at 8 p.m. Sunday on KING-TV, Channel 5, is so incredibly cheesy you’d expect it to be sponsored by Kraft.
But it is in some way poetic that yet another wrong turn for NBC this season would involve a mighty cruise ship flipping on its top and leaving just a handful of survivors.
For starters, it’s almost a standard rule that anything that must tell you it’s an “adventure” in the title is not a safe bet.
“Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” and “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” are the exceptions, of course.
Second, you don’t take on the ratings juggernaut that is “Desperate Housewives” and “Grey’s Anatomy” on a Sunday night by putting Steve Guttenberg, Adam Baldwin and Rutger Hauer on a sinking ship – no matter how appealing it might sound.
In the original 1972 film starring Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine, it was a massive wave that toppled the ocean liner.
But since we haven’t yet declared a war on water – although a couple more tsunamis and hurricanes ought to do the trick – the new version has terrorists blowing a hole in the thing.
That’s where the alleged adventure begins.
Guttenberg plays one of the main characters, Richard Clarke, although we’re never quite sure whom we should care about.
Clarke is an unhappily married man who has already hooked up with a cruise masseuse by the time everything goes awry.
I’ll never understand how that dude gets all the ladies.
By the end of the whole ordeal, of course, he sees the light and tells his wife she’s the love of his life.
That decision was made pretty easy when the masseuse fell to her death in a mass of flames.
Clarke’s kid, Dylan, is a 12-year-old aspiring film director who carries around the world’s most durable handheld video camera for the entire three hours and provides some lighter moments.
There are a handful of dramatic turns, but they’re short-lived.
In one scene, Clarke’s daughter, Shelby, is stranded up high on a table that’s bolted to the floor, which is now the ceiling.
The only way down is a potentially deadly jump.
We know it’s a potentially deadly jump because a guy moments earlier fell the same distance and, well, he didn’t get up.
The will-she-or-won’t-she moment is wrapped up in a few seconds when the group down below holds out a huge drape.
She jumps.
She’s fine.
But we aren’t.
Save yourself the grief and the possibility that your VCR might goof up while recording “Housewives” and “Grey’s,” and let someone else drown in Poseidon’s theatrical cliches.
Victor Balta’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays on the A&E page. Reach him at 425-339-3455 or vbalta@heraldnet.com.
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