Customer Reviews

Hurricane (1979) [VHS]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I first saw this movie about 7 years ago and totally fell for it. The love between Mia Farrow and Dayton Kahe was unbelievable. It was extremely romantic. The last 30 minutes of the movie, to say the least, are edge-of-your-seat excitement! Just a great movie to sit and watch on a rainy saturday night alone or with your mate. I've probably seen it 9 times or more and love it more each time I watch it. There's no doubt . . . you'll love it. Enjoy!!!

In my opinion, Dayton Ka'ne is the star attraction of this film. Beautiful Cinematography, where the movie was filmed completly on location on the island of Bora Bora.
Cast also includes, Mia Farrow, Jason Robards, Max Von Sydow, Timothy Bottoms, James Keach, Trevor Howard, Ariirau Tekurarere and Manu Tupou.
I felt that Mia Farrow was miscast in this film. Although I do know people liked her in the tv serial, "Peyton Place" and the film, Rosemary's Baby (1968).
Dayton Ka'ne sizzles the screen and his acting is honest, smooth and natural. His love scenes are tender and passionate. Those honey-colored eyes!
His dancing will have you begging for more. The ceremonial dance sequences are very captivating. The Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour, Road To...movies were never like this.On the Road With Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Collection (Road to Singapore/Road to Zanzibar/Road to Morocco/Road to Utopia).
Dorothy Lamour was in the original movie, The Hurricane [Jon Hall and Dorothy Lamour].
What is missing from this story is how Charlotte was able to obtain a connection to Matangi for it to become romantic so quickly. Perhaps a few more reaction shots is what we needed.
The special effects of the hurricane will hold your attention.
Dayton Ka'ne did one more film completed in 1979. BEYOND THE REEF (1981,) aka SHARK BOY OF BORA BORA and SEA KILLER, also produced by Dino De Laurentiis.

The VHS version is in standard full screen. Released by Paramount Pictures.

Hurricane (1979) is also available on DVD.

Charlotte (Mia Farrow) travels to a Samoan island to visit her father, the governor (Jason Robards). Before long she falls in love with the beautiful native chief Matangi (gorgeous Dayton Ka'ne). Their romance is not popular. The story moves slowly and there's not much more I can tell without giving away plot points that occur more than halfway into the movie. And this is the movie's main problem. The adventure part of the movie doesn't start after well over an hour. Director Jan Troell has never been known to make fast paced movies, and this time the script is working against him. It takes a very long time before the story really takes off and by then many viewers will already have lost their interest. The location shots are beautiful and the hurricane scenes are spectacular. These help it up to a very weak three star rating.

The DVD is presented in 1:78 widescreen (from 2:20 original). The 2 hour movie is divided into only 10 chapters. There are no special features except a trailer.

A remake of 30's classic - this was panned on release and was considered a flop on release in 1979, but it arrived when the genre was already in the death throes with big flops like Beyond The Poseidon Adventure and Meteor.

As a reminder of those big 70's disaster movies this is a standout...with unbelievable special effects for the time.
However the first half of the film concerns itself with the romance between Mia Farrow and handsome island boy Dayton Ka'ne...which is beautifully photographed and believable some of the criticism at the time was that it was just too long and dull before the real special effects start. However in the tradition of any great romance there is the angry father, the tribal dances, a trial a scorned navy captain etc etc.

A must have for fans of the 'disaster genre' like me with wonderful special effects and one of the most beautiful movie scores I have ever heard.

At last the movie was issued on The widescreen DVD format. But what you see? The colours of the "Hurricane" are very contrast and blue-oriented instead of the cinema version that I have seen before. I was really wandered why is it so? And still didnt received the answeres on this questions! the quality are not original and the colours are very poor. Any way the film is great but this DVD version is not good! I hope that there will be another remastered version of this movie by Paramount in the future, of course in widescreen.

I was so happy when i saw this movie on DVD and just had to get it.
I never thought Mia could play such a seductive role of a woman in love.
A must see for those who love watching great love stories!

"You've been playing the fool, Matangi, making cow eyes with the governor's daughter. But don't despair, there's hope for you. If foolishness was a mortal sin, Hell would have been full up years ago from overcrowding."

A one-time Roman Polanski project until his, er, legal problems intervened, 1979's Hurricane may boast some arthouse talents on the credits but it's got a Harlequin Romance mentality. A big budget reworking of John Ford's classic but rarely revived 30s forbidden love story cum disaster movie, it's the kind of film where the budget rarely seems to translate on screen, with $22m buying a rather second rate star cast - Mia Farrow, Jason Robards, Max Von Sydow, Timothy Bottoms and Trevor Howard, still playing the priest from Ryan's Daughter in all but name - and one of the least exciting natural disasters ever filmed. This time round rather than Jon Hall's unjustly imprisoned native sailor fighting the elements to return to wife Dorothy Lamour, it's Mia Farrow, daughter of Jason Robard's stern governor, failing to take Von Sydow's advice "In the tropics, take passion lightly and always with a grain of salt" and defying convention to fall for local chief Dayton Ka'ne. At times it's hard to tell whether Robards objects because he rather fancies his daughter himself or because their love scenes are so corny ("Marry me at once or leave my island!" "Do you hear that, gods? The high chief has spoken!"), but pretty soon he and racist Marine James Keach are sending him to certain death in prison and nature, clearly abhorring the vacuum the film exists in, gets bored and throws in a hurricane in the last half hour to try to liven things up. Nature loses.

Jan Troell's unenthusiastic direction takes a tortoise and the hare approach to storytelling and a clinical, almost ant farm approach to the love story. You can almost imagine a scientist with a clipboard making notes. So disastrously short of passion it's like watching two tortoises mate, his detached style is almost heroically at odds with Lorenzo Semple's often inane, wilfully tongue-in-cheek direlogue like "It's astounding that I would ever accept love as an excuse for criminal conduct!" or "You see one palm tree, you've seen `em all." Amazingly, even a scene where a ship crashes into a church doesn't kick much life in to the picture.

It's easy to see what might have appealed to Polanski - a defloration ceremony that goes violently wrong ("Don't go there, Charlotte, you wouldn't like it") and a scene where Farrow hints to her father that she'll sleep with him if he frees her lover - but the result is the kind of movie where a TV network could cut 29 minutes and nobody would complain. There are a few unintentional laughs and it's fun to catch composer Nino Rota taking his revenge on producer Dino De Laurentiis for costing him his Godfather Oscar by creeping its theme into his Hawaiian theme bar score from time to time, but it's all too easy to see why this massive money loser was so quickly forgotten - it's just dull. Even Paramount wanted nothing to do with the DVD release, sublicensing it to Legend Films, who offer a reasonable 2.35:1 transfer with only the original trailer as an extra. It's all too revealing about the film that even that can't summon up much enthusiasm until it stops showing scenes from the film and resorts to a montage of still photos to up the tempo!

With such high production values, it's too bad that this film is so relentlessly boring, followed by a mind-blowing spectacle at the end. WAY too long. Nino Rota's score was reminiscent of "The Godfather", which was not exactly appropriate. The photography by the brilliant Sven Nykvist couldn't be better; but the direction by the gifted Jan Troell kept the pace at a terminally slow level. The acting is generally wooden, especially by Ms. Farrow. As in all disaster movies, the soap opera is prevalent, which sometime can add to the proceedings (The Towering Inferno) or simply bring it down to the dud level (Krakatoa, East of Java). This definitely falls into the latter category. Start the movie half way through, and you may enjoy some fine special effects.

This was the 70's remake of the classic 30's version of this south seas tale of love, cruelty, and how one bad hurricane tops all the human drama.
I wanted to see this remake as I had never seen it before. The story line has been changed and not for the better Im afraid. I thought being in color would make it more interesting, but without the over the top acting in the first one-this remake is just bland. Its funny- but the hurricane effects in this remake are not as good as in the old 30's version.

The '70s were an embarrassment of riches for afficionados of delightfully over-inflated awful films. Every time you turned around, there was another hilarious bomb coming your way under the uncannily accurate heading "disaster movie": EARTHQUAKE, THE TOWERING INFERNO, THE SWARM, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, AVALANCHE and four AIRPORT movies, to name just a few. Ever wonder if any of them would have been better if they'd been made by more talented filmmakers? No? Well, leave it to Bad Movie maestro Dino De Laurentiis --the man behind ORCA, MANDINGO and KING KONG LIVES -- to think anyone was actually waiting for, say, Roman Polanski to tackle one of these claptrap extravaganzas. When Polanski, scheduled to direct HURRICANE, had to leave L.A. forever on rather short notice, De Laurentiis replaced him with one of Sweden's most prestigious names, Jan Troell, who had scored crossover art-house hits with the relentlessly realistic THE EMIGRANTS and its equally earthbound sequel THE NEW LAND. Never mind that he and Sweden's great cinematographer Sven Nykvist were hardly the most appropriate duo for a storm-and-smut epic; none of the subtle textures of mood they achieved are able to compromise the essential swill of the forbidden-love-between-white-girl-and-native-boy nonsense, which was already as old as the islands when Dorothy Lamour first filmed it back in 1937.

The giggles begin just as soon as virtuous flapper Mia Farrow gets an eyeful of hunky Daytone Ka'ne, the former protege of her military martinent father, Jason Robards Jr. Since Ka'ne has been named king of his island, we're soon watching him do his tribe's traditional, Chippendales-like bump 'n' grind, while outfitted in a feathered headdress and puka-shell harness that Cher would kill for. His every shimmy drives Farrow mad with lust; the director gives us closeups of her hand gripping a chair so tightly her knuckles turn white! Robards, meanwhile, is throwing such hammy, overdrawn "incestuous" glances at daughter Farrow that you may think you're watching silent movie footage. But thank heaven there's crazed dialogue to keep you laughing out loud. At one point, Robards greets Farrow in the morning by practically panting, "I couldn't sleep -- your dreams kept me awake." Troell plays this hokum straight, making it all the funnier: after Farrow and Ka'ne make love next to a lagoon, a heavenly choir swells on the soundtrack.

Robards tosses Ka'ne in the clink -- for wanton heathenism, or something -- and, to get him freed, Farrow slips into Robards's bedroom to seduce him. "I'll be as close as you want," she vamps. But her father tells her no -- not because he doesn't want to, but because she's using him. Thus, Farrow is forced to break her beloved out of jail, making the two of them the Bonnie and Clyde of Bora Bora. As often happens, their passion unleashes a hurricane that destroys everyone who's tried to keep them apart, plus a few extras. Troell strives once agaian for reality, so the eponymous storm we want to see goes by in one long blur.

In the words of the island's priest, Trevor Howard, "If foolishness was a mortal sin, hell would have been full long ago" -- yes, and a producer like De Laurentiis would have been struck down dead at this film's release.