In which we discuss Terror On the 40th Floor, The Deadly Tower, Superdome, and A Fire In the Sky, concluding our overview of the disaster telefilms Jerry Jameson directed in the 70s, which began here., where we dealt with Heatwave!, The Elevator, and Hurricane.
When I set myself to the disaster telefilms of Jerry Jameson, I negligently failed to realize there were this many, so many that even just "the disaster telefilms of Jerry Jameson of 1974" became a fractal, neverending endeavor, so that I suppose that after doing three previously and only realizing I'd missed a fourth now, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there were, somehow, four more still lurking out there to make me look foolish. Fortunately, Terror On the 40th Floor doesn't change anything I said about The Elevator, which is, if anything, even more comfortably Jameson's best movie of an extremely busy 1974. Similar in setting and somewhat in concept to The Elevator, what we've actually got here isn't that at all, and it's pretty shameless and more than a little suspect just from the outset: a skyscraper-on-fire TV disaster movie aired three months before The Towering Inferno came out in theaters in December. If that sounds hackish and mercenary and even gauche to you (yet actually about two months too early to properly parasitize on the marketing and hype for The Towering Inferno, especially when Airport 1975 is presently playing on the big screen), you're pretty much right; this is quite low-effort material. A notable distinction, anyway, is that The Towering Inferno is legitimately "about something"—mostly that fire is hot, sure—but also that skyscrapers and perhaps the system that produces them are an affront to morality, and the disaster there is triggered by greed and hubris and poor regulation; in Terror on the 40th Floor, the disaster is triggered by a drunken blue collar worker spilling fire all over everything.
