Hollywood icon Leslie Nielsen passed away November 28 from complications of pneumonia, according to Zap2it. Nielsen was most famous for his roles in The Naked Gun, Airplane and The Poseidon Adventure. He also appeared in such TV shows as The Love Boat, The Fugitive and Peyton Place.

Watch a tribute clip to The Naked Gun and Airplane after the jump!

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In disaster cinema there comes a point in the story where, as Heidi Klum would say, one is either in or out. One knows going into the theater or popping a DVD into the player what one is in for the same way one knows more or less what to expect from a slasher pic or a romantic comedy. No matter how the genre's formula is tweaked, it is up to the writers and filmmakers to provide the hooks that will draw you into their specific event or world. What hooks me varies all the time; just as often those same elements may turn me off completely.

The make-or-break moment for me in 1972's The Poseidon Adventure is the sequence when the survivors must climb the Christmas tree to escape the ballroom. In 1964's Fail Safe, the make-or-break moment is encapsulated in the tense conversation between the President of the United States and the Soviet Premier, which must be precisely interpreted. In Deep Impact, the scene is Tea Leoni's first conversation with President Morgan Freeman. There has to be something to make me care or I won't wait for the credits. After learning who lives and dies, the story is over in a movie. READ MORE

In the history of disaster cinema, no two movies illustrate the great divide between campy greatness and head scratching exclamations of "What was the %#^#*%* point?" than Irwin Allen's 1972 The Poseidon Adventure and Wolfgang Petersen's 2006 remake, Poseidon.

For all of The Poseidon Adventure's over the top excess, the original chronicle of the desperate escape efforts of trapped survivors aboard the fictional capsized ocean liner was filled with heart, unpredictability in the fates of who would live or die and we were invested in characters that we grew to care about or despise within a short period of time.

As much as we laugh at Shelley Winters' Olympic swim through the ship, there still is hardly a dry eye in the house when she succumbs to the stress of the effort and dies. On the other hand, the remake was enjoyable on its own merits but burned through its story so fast that it was nearly impossible to care about the fates of its survivors. When Freddy Rodriquez's waiter suddenly plummets to his death, who cares? If all of them died at the end of Petersen's version, it would have been a pleasant surprise.

This brings us to ABC's much hyped 2008 remake of the tornado storyline which ripped through Pine Valley in 1994, heralding the "official" arrival as Charles Pratt as All My Children's new head writer. Fitting somewhere between the technological successes and dramatic failures of the two tales of the Poseidon, so far this tornado is swerving between a lot of hot air and a gust of breaking wind. READ MORE