Seven stragglers at a Christmas Eve office party are trapped when fire breaks out in their Art Deco high-rise, and no one knows they are up there.
This darkly lit, small scale TV version of The Towering Inferno also throws in moments from Earthquake (attempts to scale the elevator shaft), and The Poseidon Adventure (lots of Christmas tree imagery - I thought at one point they were even going to use the tree itself to climb down the elevator shaft).
A news reporter on the scene helpfully explains that despite little external evidence of a fire, it is raging over several floors inside. The TV budget clearly didn't extend to burning skyscraper model shots. We do get several blazing office interiors.
It is not terrible, though the final segment drags. The actors play their parts well and I did care about the characters. There are some ridiculous bits of padding around commercial break cliffhangers and interoffice tensions resurface as colleagues argue about what they should do. The soap opera-style flashbacks are mercifully brief.
Pippa Scott's short scenes are the funniest.
This darkly lit, small scale TV version of The Towering Inferno also throws in moments from Earthquake (attempts to scale the elevator shaft), and The Poseidon Adventure (lots of Christmas tree imagery - I thought at one point they were even going to use the tree itself to climb down the elevator shaft).
A news reporter on the scene helpfully explains that despite little external evidence of a fire, it is raging over several floors inside. The TV budget clearly didn't extend to burning skyscraper model shots. We do get several blazing office interiors.
It is not terrible, though the final segment drags. The actors play their parts well and I did care about the characters. There are some ridiculous bits of padding around commercial break cliffhangers and interoffice tensions resurface as colleagues argue about what they should do. The soap opera-style flashbacks are mercifully brief.
Pippa Scott's short scenes are the funniest.