Tidal Wave: No Escape

The ending could of been better, much better. The special effects were OK. I would not buy this movie at all. It might be good if you just rent it. It might be a good sleeper for some people. NOW, to all the disaster movie people (people who like disaster movies) you might want to see it. I am one of those but the movie was OK.

This is a TV movie made back in 1997, and decent for TV for its time. Not a big budget, so one should not have big expectations. What is really comes down to is a man who 'retired' under somewhat of a cloud (John Wahl), and is now being blamed for what is happening. And the man in charge of the Institute is convinced he is responsible, and doesn't want to hear anything different. So John Wahl has to try and clear his name and pin in on the real person who is triggering the tidal waves. And naturally he finds help with a woman associate who he once knew. And she seems the only one who believes him.

This is another installment of a genre of movies in which the protagonist and eventual hero is falsely accused at first, usually by being set up. The movie Killer Wave is rather similar. These movies are good enough to watch, but usually have annoying parts to them. It all comes clean in the end, but the authorities that won't listen don't always get the karma they should.

While I was idly flicking through TV channels one afternoon I stumbled upon TIDAL WAVE: NO ESCAPE, a 1997 TV movie starring Corbin Bernsen, I decided to give it a whirl. My interest in the film was mainly generated by my suspicion that the title was a misnomer and I was soon proved correct: it's not spoiling things too much to say that the lead characters DO escape from tidal waves in this film, multiple times too.

As cheesy B-movie go, this one isn't too bad and at least there's plenty of incident to keep you watching. Bernsen (THE DENTIST), playing probably the world's most unlikely Nobel Prize winner, has to figure out the science (it's dodgy) behind some inexplicable tsunami disasters and yet still has time to romance a pretty colleague.

What follows is a mix between low-budget disaster antics and wronged man thriller; the latter is developed because of the lack of budget to focus too much on the disaster side of things, so the writers throw in a human villain and have Bernsen going on the run for much of the time. Saying there, there are some pretty silly CGI-enhanced moments, like when Bernsen attempts to out-drive an incoming tsunami and decides to take a road running parallel to the shore rather than inland.

This is hardly art, but it is a damn sight better than KILLER FLOOD: THE DAY THE DAM BROKE, I have to say. And no, that isn't a down-on-his-luck George Miller of MAD MAX fame directing, just a namesake.

Tidal Wave: No Escape begins with two tidal waves or tsunamis which seemingly coincidentally strike one after the other. One in Japan and one in the U.S. It is later learned that they were most likely man made and it soon becomes apparent when the man behind the waves demands 1 billion dollars. The only question to those in the movie, who are constantly pointing their fingers at the wrong guy, is who is really causing the tidal waves and how? We, the viewers, are let in on the perpetrator pretty early, so very little guess work is involved for us. This is more of a sit back and enjoy the special effects without using your brain type of movie.

Speaking of the special effects, how can they be so good and so bad at the same time? The tidal waves themselves were awesome. Having never even seen a picture of a real tidal wave before it crashes, this looked pretty realistic to me. So how they managed to create a giant wave that wreaks havoc through a few cities and why they need an obvious blue screen on other shots make the movie so horribly sub-par.

Corbin Bernsen, Julianne Phillips and Gregg Henry star here, but that really does not matter. The movie and these roles were so one dimensional, that nearly anyone could have played them. Gregg Henry should have steered clear entirely because he is a better actor than required here, as he displayed in Payback. This is definitely one for the special effects only. 6/10