Thursday Movie Picks #406: Artificial Disasters

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. The topic for today, as posted on the TMP site, is "April 21 - Environmental Wrongs/ Disasters (not a natural disaster, so something like Chernobyl) ". So to make things clear I decided to call it "Artificial Disasters", if only to distinguish from natural disasters, although these are all environment-related disasters, too. In the end, I did end up repeating one movie that I selected about two years ago.

Ring of Fire (1961). David Janssen plays a policeman who arrests a couple of hoodlums in a rural part of Oregon. They waylay him and force him to take them to the forest, where they're going to hike their way through to escape. Unfortunately, one of the criminals is also a smoker, and Janssen warns them that smoking in the forest is a no-no since it's so dry the whole forest could go up in flames. Of course it does, as if you couldn't figure that out from the title.

An Enemy of the People (1978). Based on the Henrik Ibsen play, this one stars Steve McQueen as the Norwegian doctor who returns to his home village, a place known for its healthful spa waters. Unfortunately, he's determined that the tannery upstream is polluting the water, making the spa extremely unhealthful. Since the spa and the tourist revenue it brings in is the lifeblood of the village, nobody in town, including brother Charles Durning), is willing to believe him.

Night of the Lepus (1972). The movie opens with docudrama-type footage of how rabbits were released by man in various parts of the world where they're not natural as a form of pest control, only to become pests themselves. We then find that ranching country in Arizona is one of those places. Rancher Rory Calhoun needs help dealing with the rabbit problem, and scientists Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh start experimenting with rabbits that will go sterile. Unfortunately, they commit an extreme (and extremely stupid) breach of the scientific method, with the result that mutant giant rabbits that can kill with one wind up roaming the countryside in slow motion. The movie has a bad reputation, but it's one of those movies that's so bad it's hilarious.