A few months back I got this review of HARD RAIN, then known as THE FLOOD, I kept forgeting about it, and well, I finally found it again so you can get a gander at it. The Big Shemp is a pretty damn good judge of movies, so if he says it was once really good, then I believe it had to have some merit. However, I really do despise the title HARD RAIN. Perhaps later they'll title a film WET RAIN or even SOFT RAIN. However, as bad as the title is, you should probably give the film a looksee!!! As with all test screenings though the film the Big Shemp saw will undoubtedly be changed quite a bit.
I went to a test screening of THE FLOOD back in March at Paramount, and the movie was terrific. THE FLOOD has been officially pushed to first-quarter 98, since Paramount also has Gary Fleder's KISS THE GIRLS, also starring FLOOD co-star Morgan Freeman, coming out on October 3. It was initially pulled from a May 2 release because of some FX which weren't done and the fact that VOLCANO was coming out at the end of April and they were worried about saturating the marketplace with disaster films (which, in hindsight, was a pretty good idea). But, unlike some on-the-shelf features, which stay on the shelf because the film just sucks (GONE FISHIN' and the saw-on-Movie Channel "Long Way from REPO MAN" Alex Cox-directed Vincent D'Onofio/Rebecca DeMornay/Billy Bob Thornton-starring THE WINNER are two that come to mind.), THE FLOOD seems more a victim of bad timing than any problems with the film itself. It's very good.
Anyway, thought your readers would appreciate some dirt about the screening, which was attended by creepy Jonathan Dolgen, the President of Viacom, Paramount's parent company. The film still had big holes in the FX-- including a title sequence (set to Springsteen's "The River") that is a long tracking shot of a river and a big dam which is on the verge of overflowing. They used toy models and mock-ups in some shots, and a couple of times intercut reaction shots of something horrible happening with a thoroughly underwhelming photo of water over a dam.
The film, which basically takes place over the course of one night, is not as much a "disaster" film as it is a solid action/heist picture with the flood as a backdrop. The cast is uniformly solid -- even Christian "Ain't Done Nothing Good Since TRUE ROMANCE" Slater -- and Morgan Freeman makes a good villainous foil, though he's outdone by the film's true antagonist (revealed in a believable plot twist), who I won't reveal here. The only rub is that we're never sure of Freeman's motivations -- who he is, why he's masterminding this heist, why he's hanging around with some dimbulb henchmen.
As written by SPEED and BROKEN ARROW scribe Graham Yost, THE FLOOD has all the momentum of the former and little of the artifice of the latter. The action sequences -- the best of which are a chase through the corridors of a flooded highschool on jet-skis and a boat pursuit that runs in and out of buildings (through windows, etc.) -- are tremendous.
But the real star of the film is its waterlogged setting, which was created in an airplane manufacturing hangar in Palmdale, CA, with buildings and streets built on platform sets which could be lowered and raised into the "floodwaters," making the river seem to rise and fall at will, when it's actually the buildings which are moving. It's an entirely believable set and you never get the impression that you're on a big soundstage, unlike FIFTH ELEMENT (except for that cool taxi chase) or -- from what I've seen so far -- BATMAN & ROBIN. There are apparently some transitions between the practical locations and the sets and between the sets and models/CG models (a dam bursting for one) that haven't been finished -- hence the "toy" shots and still cutaways mentioned above.
It's too bad this got pushed back from early summer to what looks like early next year -- the trailer, which I saw on BEAVIS & BUTTHEAD and THE RELIC was really good, and I think the film, if handled properly, would do great business. But there's such a glut of product out there that I'd rather see a movie placed in a more favorable slot than be up against five other big films and get slaughtered, or at least get its share of the pie cut down. Fox did the same thing with the Howie Long/Scott Glenn movie FIRESTORM (okay script; also polished by Yost)
THE FLOOD -- which may get retitled to the retarded-sounding "Riders of the Storm" or "Riders on the Storm" -- is a solid movie.
((HARRY NOTE: IT WAS INDEED RETITLED SOMETHING RETARDED, HARD RAIN, THE MOST HIDEOUS TITLE IN A LONG TIME))
