Theme Song: Some dude was going absolutely nuts with the post-production explosion sound. Over and over, anytime there’s an explosion in this documentary, they overdub the exact same sound.
Social Context: Our world of constant internet news cycle makes the idea of a 90-minute disaster-clip documentary seem unnecessary. Nowadays without much effort, we get to see footage of someone dying on a pretty regular basis. Back in the day, you had to really work at it to track down footage of people dying.
Summary: Cheesy doom and gloom narration runs through a series of clips of old news and stock footage of scientists looking at documents and charts.
Events covered include the Hindenburg disaster, the 1933 California earthquake, hurricane Camille, the Teton Dam bust, the LeMans disaster, and the Swede Savage crash at the Indianapolis Speedway.
Footage from the Texas City Disaster and the Joelma Building fire was the most interesting and graphic. There is so much stock footage intertwined with platitudes that it’s all a little hard to take seriously, but if you’ve ever seen any other Sunn documentaries, this is standard.
Worth Mentioning:
– As mentioned, this is a Sunn Classics production that has a great and storied history of ‘documentary’ releases dealing with fringe topics in the 1970s.
– There’s a good amount of footage of the Xenia, Ohio tornado outbreak which is referenced in Gummo.
Poster and Box Art: The VCI home video release of Encounter With Disaster features a totally bitching end-of-world painting that covers fire, plane crashes, tornados, flooding, bridge collapse, and shrieking people. It rules.
