Krakatoa: East Of Java (UK)

Introduction

You can tell that the DVD format truly has come of age when the budget labels start trawling the back catalogues for titles to release. It's the equivalent of Cinema Club on VHS, and not only do you get the re-releases of blockbusters sans extras, but you also get those films that likely won't have a massive audience. But someone out there remembers them with nostalgia, and given the economy of a vanilla disc, there's still a profit to be made. The positive side of this is that the DVD format is the great equaliser. Given a moderately clean print and a fair transfer, you'll get a similar performance from a budget disc as you will from something from the top of the range. It's a far cry from budget VHS tapes that would just as soon vandalise your machine as play the movie.



Like many a child of the seventies, I have a soft spot for a good disaster movie. While the idea of death and destruction on a massive scale has been a staple of cinema since its inception, with films like King Kong and War Of The Worlds making memorable impacts on movie audiences, it wasn't until the seventies with the advent of widescreen, teeth rattling sound systems and special effects technology that the disaster movie came of age. With films like Airport, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, and The Poseidon Adventure, the genre cemented itself in public perception as a summer spectacular, and cinema has never really looked back. I was surprised to learn that Krakatoa preceded all these films by a good couple of years, yet it has the formula down pat, an awe-inducing disaster looming in the background, while a motley cast of characters live out their soap opera lives underneath its looming shadow. Most important of all, you can play 'guess who will survive until the end of the movie', when the story gets too anodyne.

It's 1883 and Chris Hanson is the captain of the Batavia Queen. He had an affair with a married woman, Laura Travis and it was a scandal that wrecked her marriage, drove her to a breakdown and left her institutionalised. Her husband took her son, and their ship was lost near Krakatoa. Now Laura wants to find her son, and Hanson puts the Batavia Queen at her disposal. It's a full-blown salvage operation, and Hanson isn't leaving anything to chance. Coming aboard the ship are diver Harry Connerly and his girl Charlie, father and son balloonists from the Borghese family, diving bell inventor Douglas Rigby, and a quartet of Japanese pearl divers. But at the last minute, he's saddled with 30 convicts requiring transportation to a prison colony, among them a good friend and former crewmember. The big draw is a fortune in pearls reputed to be on the wreck. But Rigby is claustrophobic in his own diving bell, the Borgheses don't get along with each other, Connerly has wrecked his lungs and is a laudanum addict, and the prisoners are already plotting an insurrection. And all the while, the volcano is becoming increasingly temperamental.

Picture

The opening credits boast Cinerama in glowing letters. The DVD uses a restored 35mm print that is cropped to create a 2.35:1 ratio. It's still an improvement over the pan and scan through which I had only ever seen this film, and at no point does the picture feel cramped. There is a hint of age, with some flicker and the odd burst of print damage, but Krakatoa looks surprisingly fresh and vibrant for a film of its vintage. The image is clear of any significant artefact, and if there is as smidgen of grain, it's to be expected in a 40 year old film. It's just a shame about the effects falling short of the story.

Sound

DD 2.0 English, which may be stereo, but feels mono. It's a straightforward port of the original film, with nothing fancy done for the effects sequences and moments of total destruction. There is a noticeable layer change though. Incidentally, a disaster movie is an odd place for a musical number…

Conclusion

There a whole horde of pedants out there that will gleefully point out that Krakatoa was indeed west of Java, and this film's title is a blooper in itself. Ignore them. Head east from Java and you will get to where Krakatoa was, eventually. You just have to go the long way round. Which, coincidentally is the feeling I got watching this film last night, that I had taken an inordinately long time to cover two hours of story.

Krakatoa is dull as dishwater. It's slow, ponderous and unimaginatively put together. Character development is an afterthought, and the film is let down by some woeful and repetitive effect sequences. Watching a papier-mâché mountain explode once is dispiriting enough, but seeing that same shot for the fifteenth time is positively mind numbing. The budget must have vanished early on, as this film provides its own library of stock footage, and if there is an effects shot anywhere in the film, you can bet that the editors will get value for money by reusing it as often as is humanly possible. The editing of the movie is lacklustre overall, with Connerly's drug addicted haze extended beyond all usefulness, and a scene of a balloon in peril stretched to over five minutes, just to show a beach ball narrowly avoiding the same rock over and over.



It could have been much better, with tighter editing, less of an emphasis on ropy effects work, and more attention paid to developing the characters. As it is, they are just cookie cutter stereotypes, with Hanson the sort of heroic know it all that always prevails in situations like these. Connerly the cracked diver who has one good dive left in him, "I swear it, just give me a chance", the boyish and charming inventor, the moustache twirling villainous plotting ex-friend turned convict. Actually, come to think of it, the later, more successful disaster movies were no less inundated with stock characters; it's just that they usually got satisfying story arcs. Here, the villain's comeuppance practically happens off screen, the duelling father and son get no real resolution of their conflict, the junkie diver's redemption is ultimately pointless as his character remains unchanged, while the heroic captain winds up grinning heroically as his ship sails off into the stormy sunset, heroically.

I think I liked it more for the papier-mâché mountain exploding when I was a kid, not really paying attention to the plot. Despite the shiny new print, this is a film best left for the last chance saloon.