In 1972, Nielsen appeared as the ship's captain in the all-star disaster epic The Poseidon Adventure.

It recently awarded four stars to the environmental disaster epic "The Day After Tomorrow," which was savaged by most established critics.

For every "Chinatown" and "Godfather," I had to sit through dozens of schlocky car-chase movies, brutal revenge fantasies, misogynistic buddy pictures and bloated disaster epics.

The 1974 disaster epic "The Towering Inferno" came out just as the fear of fire in the trade center was escalating, and soon enough the comparisons started.

"I could get a horror movie made easily, but I'd rather create a fun world than a disaster epic."

The shockumentary is the disaster epic of the MTV age, decontextualized, fragmented and edited at light speed.

His latest, "Daylight," a conventional disaster epic set in a traffic tunnel, cost $90 million but didn't come close to earning that much back when it was released last December.

"The film is widely viewed as having paved the way for disaster epics of the '70s, like Airport and the Poseidon Adventure."

The announcers seemed as fascinated by that as anything else in the late innings of the Yankees' disaster epic.

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times called it a "surprisingly cheesy disaster epic" while musing, "The lava keeps flowing for much of the movie, never looking convincing.