3/2/07: Heat Wave! (1974)

Deadlines still loom, but our work ethic demands that we provide a new entry. Also, we want to goof on this made-for-TV curio before someone else remembers it. To be fair, Heat Wave! is a solarized slice of ’70s eco-terror that deserves to be forgotten.

Ben Murphy and Bonnie Bedelia star as a nice couple who make the mistake of having sex about nine months before a massive heat wave hits town. The pregnant Bedelia is then forced to give birth in a small mountain community that doesn’t have any electrical power. Maybe young Al Gore had just purchased his first power strip.

Anyway, the sweltering heat requires the couple to do a lot of hiking, and there are some stirring scenes where we learn how to throw together an incubator for newborn infants. The best part, though, is earlier in the film. There’s a stockbroker who doesn’t care about the impending hot weather. All he cares about is big business. He points towards this huge market ticker and declares, “That keeps running no matter what the weather does.”

Or words to that effect. The important thing is that the power eventually goes off in his office, and the market ticker comes to a grinding (or blinking) halt. The poor thoughtless stockbroker has to be helped outside in a semi-catatonic state because—well, his entire life has been made meaningless by a power outage. That seemed stupid to us even back in 1974.

You know what else was a big problem in 1974? Killer bulldozers. A few days after Heat Wave! aired, there was this other TV-movie where an alien force came to Earth and possessed a bulldozer, and it chased Clint Walker and Neville Brand and Robert Urich all over a Pacific island. Clint Walker ended up kicking that bulldozer’s ass. We’re sure that kind of American know-how will eventually take care of this heat wave nonsense, too.

Make it your own: You can’t. Heat Wave! isn’t! available! on! DVD! (Or! VHS!) All the copies must have melted. We’re writing this from ancient memory—specifically, of seeing Heat Wave! again on some small-town UHF station back in 1982. It had only gotten funnier.

 

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