Editor Reviews:

Amazon.com essential video:
Disaster movies used to work because there was little certainty as to who would survive. Not so in this film, really an amalgam of two original stories, about a group of well-to-do celebrants at the top floor of a skyscraper. Cheapo electrical wiring and bad construction management cause an enormous blaze at the lower floors, steadily rising to consume the revelers. Newman's an architect, McQueen a firefighter, and Fred Astaire a kind old gentleman, for which he was Oscar-nominated. O.J. Simpson plays a security guard who rescues a cat. Now that's a disaster. --Keith Simanton

Rating : - Ah...memories
Arguably the king of the 70's disasters flicks, The Towering Inferno takes a couple of crazy ideas like build a tower 135 floors in San Francisco and let's do it on the cheap. What's the worse that can happen? Blessed with an all star cast and armed with some state of the art (at the time) pyrotechnics, The Towering Inferno, despite the cheese, doesn't fail to thrill you. It's fun to guess who's going to live and who's going to die. Never mind why it takes so long for the fire department to arrive and why didn't everyone just go to the roof and have an arm of helicopters pick them up. Or better yet-blow the tanks earlier. Still, it's good entertainment.