The name Samuel Z Arkoff appears first on the credits. This could be interesting or it could be terrible. Keep watching. The cast includes Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Brian Keith, Karl Malden, Martin Landau, Trevor Howard and Henry Fonda. Now there is a decent bunch of actors, all usually good value. Keep watching. Directed by Ronald Neame, a distinguished British director by any standards. And then follows a disaster of a disaster film.<br /><br />There is a strange dichotomy between the high quality of the cast and the low quality of the other elements in the film. The painfully meagre special effects, the shrill music, the leaden plot. It seems a strange brew and even a reviewer like myself who will always try to pick out some good points in a film am at a loss. The thing that distracted me the most was that the meteor itself, a wide lump of pitted and gruyered rock seemed to have a sound effect, like an engine! Perhaps it was my imagination.<br /><br />This film is not good enough or bad enough to be a cult film. It is just tepid and flat and makes 'the Towering Inferno' look like the 'Citizen Kane' of disaster movies.<br /><br />