A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

The screenplay is not good at all. The special effect is not bad in 1968 standard; very primitive and looked so obviously phony. The whole film just looked quite fake. The casting was not good at all. Diane Baker's acting was terrible. Maximilian Schell was the only actor who hold the whole movie together and didn't fall apart almost any moment. It's a tough movie for all the stunt men, running around on the ship, jumping to the sea, climbing up and down. Nobody seemed to give a damn about the treasure, bags of pearls, not even one seaman looked at those bags, that's high moral standard of seamanship. There were flaws almost in every segment but forgivable. The soundtrack was annoying like Walter Disney's cartoons'. The eruptions of the volcano looked more alike a well-arranged sequential fireworks.

Being a big Krakatoa buff, and a lover of disaster movies in general, I had great expectations for this film, especially given that it had a decent cast of capable, well-known 60's actors. However, this movie is an absolutely stunning (as in, being hit with a blunt object) example of why films need editors who know what they are doing. The scenes just seem to be thrown together and change so abruptly that you sometimes wonder if you are still watching the same movie. An example: a scene where Krakatoa is spewing cinders and lava, darkening the sky to almost black, as the passengers of the Battavia Princess look on solemnly - suddenly changes to clear blue sky, with happy people cavorting on the deck while the insipidly upbeat theme song plays cheerfully in the background. There are glaring incongruities, such as scantily clad girls diving happily into an ocean which in a previous scene was littered with dead fish and birds killed by the volcano. Many of the plot elements are ridiculous because they were poorly researched (among them the glaring fact that Krakatoa is actually west of Java), and others which were researched are skimmed over so as to be rendered almost insignificant (such as the piercing whistle created by steam escaping from Krakatoa's vent - an occurrence which must have been truly terrifying but which is treated as "Well, that was weird, what's for dinner?"). Way too much time is spent on silly subplots, such as a search for sunken treasure. In the opening scenes, we see a group of school children, frightened by the loud explosions. In a later scene, they are rescued from a dingy - but we never find out how they came to be there (never mind the fact that in reality, they would have been doomed no matter where they were). The saddest thing is, in the hands of a capable editor and research department, this could have been an excellent film, at least in the same category as Titanic. Instead, we get dull action, contrived plot devices, an absolutely horrendous musical score, and very little of what was likely the most spectacular natural disaster in recorded history. I agree with the commentator who suggested that this movie would make a great candidate for a remake. With the right director, a better script, a competent editor and a dash of CGI, the eruption of Krakatoa could be the back drop for some very impressive storytelling.

having recently watched a science special on the eruption of krakatoa, i thought that this movie might be interesting. i may have seen it when it first came out, i'm not sure. anyway, i dvr'd it and ended up fast forwarding through a lot of it. poor story line, characters, and please, those special effects were pretty poor, when you think this is less than a decade before star wars. just obviously model ships and waves superimposed over people, structures etc. the only interesting parts happened when they focused on the science of the eruption itself--or rather the effects of that. for example, the strange sounds or the explosions in the water. in the science special there were so many eyewitnesses and true stories of survivors. marvelously told along with the true facts about this event. for example, it produced the loudest sound ever heard on earth, rendering the population temporarily deaf. so much could have been done with this movie, had they only stayed with the known facts and truth. so i have to say, if you want the excitement of one the greatest eruptions ever to happen on earth, and interesting personal stories of what happened that day, watch the science special instead. this movie was just plain bad.

I first saw this movie at the cinema when I was a kid, and it blew me away, if you'll excuse the expression. Probably also started my lifelong interest in Tidal Waves, as I think it was the first time I'd ever heard of them. Watching it 35 years later was not, unfortunately, a particularly rewarding experience.For a start, purely by coincidence, a couple of days before my online rental copy arrived in the mail, a local station played a documentary about the disaster, which despite being a slapped together TV production, made the documentary aspect of the film look outright pathetic. 'Krakatoa' won the special effects Oscar for 1969, and it's quite amazing how old and limited those effects actually seem, compared even with movies of a few years later, like 'The Poseidon Adventure'.Probably what disappointed me most about 'East of Java' is that I had remembered it as focusing much more on the volcanic eruption than it actually does. The film is far more concerned with the adventure yarn about diving for pearls, and the romance between the two main characters. Krakatoa almost seems like just a backdrop sometimes. People rarely even refer to the fact that there's a mountain in the process of blowing itself into the stratosphere, a few hundred yards away. Maximilian Schell as the unflappable captain is particularly infuriating in this regard, as nothing the volcano throws up seems to phase him in the slightest. He barely seems interested in it, as if mountains explode during diving expeditions on a fairly regular basis.The rest of the cast are all adequate, but nobody excels. There is a rather distasteful sequence where an admittedly laudanum-sozzled Brian Keith assaults a Japanese diving girl, and after he dries out by being suspended in a crate for a few hours, nobody seems to think it was a particularly noteworthy incident.It's a decent adventure yarn, but there is little effort made to summon the sense of foreboding and dread which would have been appropriate given what was about to happen. I suppose the art of building tension in disaster movies wasn't really honed until the early to mid 70's.