Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet get that sinking feeling in James Cameron's disaster epic, Titanic. (Getty Images)

The cinema has had a lifelong love affair with catastrophe. Early silent films revelled in classical cataclysms like The Last Days of Pompeii. Hollywood in the 1930s torched Atlanta (Gone With the Wind), drowned India (The Rains Came) and shook San Francisco (San Francisco). In the 1970s, the disaster movie finally became a whole genre unto itself, thanks to destruction-fests like Airport, The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure and the literally theatre-rattling Earthquake.

The 1990s saw another boom – Twister, Deep Impact, Armageddon and that Oscar-winning orgy of historical inaccuracies, Titanic. In the age of global warming and AIDS, it’s not surprising that recent disaster pics are usually environmental (The Day After Tomorrow) or viral (28 Days Later, I Am Legend) or both (The Happening). All of which provides fodder for Disaster Movie, a new comedy opening Aug. 29.

The good folks who brought us Scary Movie, Date Movie et al. have fun lampooning a genre as famous for its over-acting as its over-the-top special effects. But let’s not be too quick to dismiss the disaster flick. Pondering my own lifetime of witnessing floods, fires, explosions and plagues of zombie-vampires – on the screen, at least – I’ve come to appreciate the didactic value of cinematic calamities. Here are 10 lessons I’ve learned from watching disaster movies.

1. Don’t mess with a higher power.

An angry Jehovah is a creative Jehovah, as Yul Brynner’s stubborn pharaoh discovered in The Ten Commandments. Defy His will and you could end up knee-deep in a plague of frogs, locusts, boils and other icky things.

Kevin Costner in a scene from Waterworld, a disaster movie in more ways than one. (Universal Studios)

2. If there’s a global flood, make sure you have a boat.

Just ask John Huston’s sage Noah in The Bible — the guy was measuring cubits and sawing wood long before the Deluge. Or Kevin Costner, who found a trusty trimaran was the best way to navigate a saturated Earth in Waterworld.

3. But don’t ever, ever call your ship “unsinkable.”

If you do, you’re just inviting a late-night run-in with a honking-big iceberg. Filmmakers have loved this lesson in hubris so much, they’ve turned the sinking of RMS Titanic into at least nine big-screen and TV movies. The best version is still A Night to Remember (1958), but James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster Titanic did have gut-twisting FX – and Leo DiCaprio’s dreamy blue eyes.

4. Never let a sweaty, beady-eyed guy clutching a briefcase on your airplane.

Especially one named D.O. Guerrero. He was the suicidal contractor in 1970’s Airport who managed to board a commercial airliner with a bomb in his carry-on luggage. Guerrero, played to twitchy perfection by Van Heflin, had a lot to answer for – and not just that gaping hole in the fuselage. The original Airport was so successful that it launched a fleet of sequels and spoofs, as well as the whole '70s disaster trend. Today, of course, the poor guy would be lucky to sneak a pair of nail clippers on a plane.

Samuel L. Jackson fights a plane load of deadly reptiles in the aptly titled Snakes on a Plane. (New Line Pictures/Associated Press)

5. Same goes for poisonous reptiles.

After the sobering reality of 9/11, we all needed a good laugh – hence 2006’s ludicrous Snakes on a Plane, in which Samuel L. Jackson played an FBI agent wrestling a jet-load of venomous critters above the Pacific. You can see those snakes as a metaphor for terrorists – or not. Likely not.

6. If you're going to build a 138-storey skyscraper, don’t cut corners.

That cheapo wiring you installed may short out and turn your soaring dream into a flaming nightmare. Or so The Towering Inferno taught us. And if that happens, you’d better hope you have a resourceful fire chief like Steve McQueen and a brave architect like Paul Newman to battle the conflagration.

7. It’s unwise to put nuclear weapons in the hands of paranoid right-wing generals.

Witness Sterling Hayden’s Gen. Jack D. Ripper, who launched an air strike on Russia – leading to atomic Armageddon – in Dr. Strangelove. His reason? He thought fluoridated water was a commie conspiracy to sap Americans’ “precious bodily fluids.”

8. Don’t build your city too close to a volcano.

The good burghers of Pompeii learned this lesson — too late — when nearby Vesuvius erupted in AD 79 and buried them in volcanic ash. Their folly, and the classic Bulwer-Lytton novel it inspired, first hit the screen in 1913 with The Last Days of Pompeii. There have been four film remakes – including one directed by spaghetti-western maestro Sergio Leone – as well as a British TV series in the 1980s.

9. Don’t build your nuclear power plant too close to a city.

In one of those eerie coincidences, The China Syndrome, the 1979 thriller about a reactor meltdown near Los Angeles, was released less than two weeks before the real Three Mile Island accident near Middletown, Pa. Even more amazing, star/producer Michael Douglas and his partners refused to exploit the coincidence to sell their flick. Who said Hollywood moguls aren’t sensitive?

Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore is shown in a scene from his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. (Eric Lee/Paramount Classics/Canadian Press)

10. Always follow a huge dose of bad medicine with a pinch of sugar.

Like a father who tells a terrifying bedtime story and then tucks you in with a kiss, Al Gore ends his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth by assuring us we can still beat global warming if we use energy-saving light bulbs and take public transit. Thanks for the useful tips, Al. But that doesn’t mitigate the fact that your documentary will go down as the scariest disaster movie of the decade.

Disaster Movie opens Aug. 29.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

Have you learned anything from watching disaster movies? If so, leave us a comment below.