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A brilliant film that helped define a genre

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Yes, there are a few minutes in this piece of convoluted trash where characters suddenly break out in song. It's the story of a passenger ship heading to Java. Maybe the ship was heading east, but the infamous volcanic mountain is east of Java! The mistake in the title wouldn't be so bad had there not been a song with lyrics that insisted that the volcanic island was east. In between the bad song numbers while waiting for the impending eruption, there's a ton of character development involving the strange captain (Brian Keith) who has sudden hallucinations, the equally handsome Maximilian Schell and Rossano Brazzi, and in fleeting appearances, the much wasted Sal Mineo. The film slowly plods along like the ship, picking up speed here and there, being appropriately cinematic, but never as suspenseful as one would hope.Barbara Werle and Diane Baker provide the feminine beauty to add to some of the gorgeous scenery, but this is a film that focuses more on the men. A great scene has a balloon flying towards the volcano opening that results in a horrific aftermath. I just wish that they had taken more care to the story and the structure, because at just over two hours, it drags a ton and feels very shallow among such deep waters.

Inspired by the 1883 eruption of the volcano on Krakatoa, Bernard L. Kowalski's disaster film is above average but getting to the crux of the picture is something of a bind. Standard rules apply, a group of disparate passengers on board a boat faff around in search of some sunken pearls, all while the volcano rumbles ominously in the background. There's love interest, lost family members, personal problems, debt mismanagement, addiction - which in turn provides the scope for fights, shifty doings and under water action. Then the carnage comes in a wave of Technicolour/Cinerama and noise. Who will survive? Will you care? And did we really see Barbara Werle serenade and strip for Brian Keith?Disposable but just about above average. 6/10

Back in the early Fifties, Republic Pictures made a feature film Fair Wind to Java that featured the Krakatoa volcanic eruption and explosion that was a B film and didn't pretend anything else. Too bad the era of B films was at an end when this one came out.Don't get me wrong, Krakatoa, East of Java had great special effects, but it would have been nice if there had been a story worthy of those effects.Captain Maximilian Schell is using his tramp steamer to go on a diving expedition to recover lost pearls. He has to locate the ship that they went down in so Max is prepared. He's got a father and son team of balloonists, Rossano Brazzi and Sal Mineo, a deep sea diver Brian Keith and his sweetheart Barbara Werle and Diane Baker who is the widow of the guy who lost the pearls in the first place.And then the Dutch authorities decide he's to take on a gang of convicts for transportation. Their leader, J.D. Cannon is a former mate on Schell's ship and Schell out of friendship gives him the freedom of the deck.I'll stop here because this thing gets dumber as it goes along. Why in heaven's name would Schell even take his ship out looking for riches with a group of convicts on is beyond me. If the authorities insisted he take them, I'd have dropped the convicts where they were to go first and then gone for the pearls. Or maybe not taken the thing out at all. And surely not have given Cannon the freedom of the deck. What a moron.Why Brian Keith has Barbara along also doesn't make sense. Maybe he don't trust her to behave, but his reasons are obscure. And director Bernard Kowalski gives Werle a musical number. Whose decision was that to include it in the film? It's not even that good.In a recent biography of Sal Mineo, the author recounts that when this film was having its premiere in Honolulu, Mineo walked out of the premiere, proclaiming to one and all what a piece of trash this film was. I probably think Sal knew it, but at the time he needed the dough.Maximilian Schell is a fine actor, but action adventure hero he's not. Either he did this as an effort to expand his horizons or he too needed the dough.Maybe one day someone will make a good film about Krakatoa, but this ain't the one. And who knows, maybe that someone will correctly place Krakatoa west of Java.

This is one I didn't see when it first came out. With its title what it was, I figured that anyone who couldn't understand East from West, probably wouldn't be able to produce a legitimate adventure film.Decades later, I saw a videotape of the film on sale, so I picked it up (it was cheaper than renting it). I'd learned in the meantime that the actual Krakatoa explosion was in the megaton range, so I was wondering how it would be treated in the film.Probable spoilers follow.IMHO, not very well. That close to the island, the ship wouldn't have survived an explosion that intense. But the fireworks were okay.After having seen a number of disaster films, I was surprised that this early one had a musical number in it. At least The Poseidon Adventure had the excuse that the singer was a performer.Entertaining, but not that credible.