ragpap93
Warning you must not watch this film alone. Take the company of Joel and his robots from MST3K. This movie is not for everyone only for those who watched IMDb bottom 100 and are currently watching all the MST3K movies. The season one movies were horrible and the riffing of them by the satellite of love were not great. The various fire puns like 'She's an old flame' and 'cooking with Barry' were among the funny riffs but some voice overs coincided with the character's in the movie and an incomprehensible mess is formed. Shelley Winters was in her 'Poseidon Adventures' form. Leslie Nielson was wasted in his role as mayor. An absolutely predictable film with an ending like any other film. The main characters are all intact except Shelley Winters of course.
jjnxn-1
I'm a disaster movie fan and completist so I've been tracking this down for years, I wish I could say it was worth it. It's good for a laugh or two at the improbable idiocy of the plot but that's about the end of its worth.Closing in on the bottom of the barrel this flick makes no sense, picking up and dropping plot points at random intervals. The villain of this thing is so sketchily drawn you have only the vaguest idea of what his motive is. That is the largest failing of the film there is no clear focus to anything. None of the characters are compelling enough to invest in and the special effects are laughable. Not a single one is clearly drawn enough for the viewer to know who they are so you can root for them. Full of one time stars this uses them ill. Shelley Winters at least tries to give a performance but Ava Gardner and Henry Fonda, both looking the worse for wear, obviously did it strictly for the loot and are phoning it in, Henry being the worst offender. If you're a disaster movie junkie this is a must see but for anyone else its a Grade Z mess.
Jonathon Dabell
City on Fire is one of the poorest of the 70s disaster films, but not the very worst (Meteor, Avalanche, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure are all a touch worse). It features a stellar cast that includes Ava Gardner, Henry Fonda, Barry Newman and Leslie Neilsen, but most of them seem bored by the material and just hover around in front of the fire, spouting bad dialogue and wondering aloud how much worse it will get and how many more victims it will claim. The fire is started by a disgruntled employee at a power station. Within an hour, it has spread beyond the power station to the whole city, and the film focuses in particular on the hospital, which is fast becoming an unsurvivable inferno. The scenes of patients and doctors running, drenched in water, through the burning streets are pretty exciting, but come so late in the film that many viewers will have switched off by then. Barry Newman is the best actor in it, given a rare leading role and making the most of it. The others, as I've mentioned. don't seem at all bothered. The production is certainly not cheap. It looks very real amid the fire and death, and to have assembled such a good cast obviously took considerable money. Unfortunately, the film is bad though. It takes too long to get going and doesn't try any new things compared with all the disaster movies that have been made before. I'd give this one a miss I were you, unless you're a pyromaniac or hooked on the disaster genre.
aspreadb1
Forget that Ed Wood has ever made the worst movie in history....this by far is the WORST. It's bad. Very very bad. Unbelievable that Henry Fonda or Shelly Winters even looked at the script let alone agreed to star in it. Did I mention how dreadful this movie is? I'm Canadian and I'm completely ashamed that this is a Canadian movie.
AD
