sharper3d Review of S.O.S. Tidal Wave

S.O.S. Tidal Wave (1939)

A truly bad film, absurdly bad...saw it on TV about 50 years ago.

[1/10 · 4 September 2005]

I remember this as an amazingly bad film, for years after seeing it, late one night in my preteen years. One of the absurdities about it, was that it was about television, some six years before commercial TV was actually seen by most of the public. The so-called TV cameras were film newsreel cameras with big magazines for film. They could have left them off to "fake" a TV camera, but they didn't. The TV screens looked nothing like actual TV. The movie showed "live" coverage coming from these film cameras.Much of it the film was stock footage from "Deluge", a big 1933," King Kong era" film about a tidal wave (tsunami) wrecking ships & flooding Manhattan. This "End of the world theme" survived with only the Manhattan footage, then crudely re-edited, and mixed with a little new material, with a new cast, about crooks and TV as a news reporting medium.It looked like the new stuff was shot in about 2 days! The result, I'd say, was the worst late 30's movie ever made.. Later, 20 to 25 years, people like Ed Wood, Ray Steckler, & Vic Savage made some "nearly as bad" films,("Plan 9" etc.)but that was "semi-intentional".I wrote the scenario, (there was no screenplay!) at age 20 for "The Creeping Terror" directed by Vic Savage.He, Ed Wood, Steckler and others were more or less playing "AT" movie making, as a kind of life style thing!I think "SOS Tidal Wave" was more genuinely bad... because the makers were probably more professional,truly trying to weave a story out of loose ends, assuming people were too dumb to notice the cameras shooting "new-fangled" TV ,were movie news cameras. The real "dumbies" were the professionals who threw this mess together, so off handedly...Or so it seemed to me, as a kid, 50 years ago.