Lava Storm (2008)

I'll be straight up honest with you. Tonight's movie choice was a little bit last minute. I've been pretty busy with work all month and I had to be in the office yesterday and didn't get home till like 9.00pm which was a farce... but I watched a video about the Mount St. Helens disaster in the 80's the other day and I really fancied a volcano disaster movie for tonight's FTW pick and err... well, here we are. That and I learned the protagonist literally has the same name as me. A great name I might add. But by all accounts this is a pretty rotten experience which means, I am absolutely looking forward to it of course because that's how things work on this blog. 

After two step siblings, Ian (Adrien Dixon) and Emma (Nicole Maillet) discover the bodies of their dead friends whilst hanging out down in a mine, they phone through to their dysfunctional and fire fighting parents... no literally they fight fires; John Wilson (excellent name, oh he's played by Ian Ziering) and Lori (Valerie Valois) who argue a little bit before Lori heads to the mines to rescue them and John decides to try and find out why suddenly everywhere is on fire. Lori finds the kids almost immediately which is quite impressive before contradicting herself and saying she needs to go into the mines to investigate and then saying she needs to take them (the kids) to their grandpa's immediately. WELL WHICH ONE IS IT LORI? Whilst back at a river somewhere, John suddenly discovers that ash is raining from the sky. Then there are fires, lots of fires, but that's enough of that because Lori rocks up at Grandpa's with the kids, and John is there and they trade mean spirited jibes at each other before John and Lori run off and their bratty kids moan about being left behind with Grandpa (Vlasta Vrana). Man, this is so bad. As John takes Lori to the river and shows her the ash rain speculating that "this isn't a volcano, it's something bigger." back at Grandpa's, in between the kids moaning, Grandpa begins to get worried about the ash rain and leads the whinging teenagers to his shelter; a panic room turned bomb shelter in basement. Sweet hang out. At the mines, Lori and John head inside where John hypothesises is could be a basalt flood which is... actually clever science, I'll give them that and deeper inside the cave they discover a magma chamber beginning to form and only just make it out before being boiled alive! On the surface they discover the town has now been engulfed by an unrelenting magma spread, and back inside Grandpa's shelter, after taking an impromptu nap, Emma wakes up coughing and struggles to revive the others as the room fills with poisonous gas. Racing back to Grandpa's, John and Lori burst in and manage to revive the trio and bundle them in a truck before racing away just in time for the house to... explode... in the most unspectacular fashion which makes everyone really sad. As they drive through volcanic ash clouds with no discernible destination facing almost certain incineration, John and Lori think this a really good time to moan at Ian about his newly acquired smoking habit. Man we picked the worst family to follow through this tragedy. But that's enough of that because we have to cut to some more stock footage. Arriving back at the Emergency Centre that was once their usual base of operations, John and Lori discover the place completely wrecked, parts on fire, everything covered in a blanket of ash, but somehow a photo of the pair is remarkably completely unspoiled! Remarkably a very old Apple Powerbook has also survived completely intact and the pair use it to discern that the ash cloud stretches from Canada to Germany and then decide to bicker over what to do next, with Emma and Ian getting in on the bickering just for good measure, before they get jerked back to reality by a lava bomb dropping from the sky right next to them. Although only temporarily as they decide now is GREAT time to argue and slag each other off some more! Where is that lava flow anyway? What's taking it so long? Seemingly, maybe just as fed up with arguing with each other as we are watching them, the family make a decision to grab the "avalanche cannon" to blow up the nearby dam in hopes to slow down the expanding lava flow... I... can't begin to explain why that's a bad idea but whatever... whilst Lori evacuates the kids and Grandpa to safety. Deciding that they haven't done quite enough arguing yet, as Ian argues about whether or not he can go with John to the dam, more lava bombs rain down and Lori gets injured. The family then split up with John and Ian tasked with taking out the dam whilst Grandpa, Lori and Emma evacuate to the cavern. Arriving at the dam, John and Ian have to give the rest of the family a few hours to make it through the cavern before they flood the joint. Hey maybe they could squeeze in some more arguing? And back in the cavern, all is mostly going according to plan until Lori gets stuck, meaning Grandpa has to go in after her... but back at the dam an approaching pyroclastic cloud means John and Ian can't give them those few hours and back inside the cavern, Grandpa is unable to free up Lori and Emma, panicking decides to go in after both of them, and with her help they are able to free Lori and continue on their way. Back at the dam, after wasting x2 shots, and Ian getting lucky with a third, John takes the final shot, and blows the dam wall before they scramble away to safety as the water cascades through. After some lovely stock footage and shots of the family in the cavern listening to the rumbles above... or below?... I'm not really sure at this point... Ian and John emerge in the cavern from, well, just around the corner somehow? Completely bone dry having managed to somehow outrun both a tidal wave of water and an enveloping pyroclastic cloud and everyone hugs it out, neglecting poor Grandpa in the background who just looks sort of forlorn. And then we get a lovely preachy message at the end. Fantastic.

WHAT A LOAD OF FUCKING SHIT. We picked the worst family to follow through this disaster. The worst. If you didn't want to see them swallowed up by a molten lava flow by the end of it then you are a far more tolerant person than I am. Even if one of the characters did share a name with me. About the only semi-likeable person in this was the Grandpa! The others can fuck all the way off! Absolutely terrible. I hated this. I just wanted it to be over.

Let's give credit where credit is due I think first of all. There was some pretty decent special effects in this thing. Like the ash rain, and the surface layering of ash from the eruptions, that was pretty decent. Like it looked pretty genuine. And there was some other bits, the set designs for ruined buildings and stuff were all pretty decent. And err... no... no I think that's about it really.

I don't know if it was down to them not being very good at the characters they were meant to portray in the movie, or if by having all the characters be a bunch of argumentative tossers, that that was supposed to add a different dynamic to everything? 'Oh look how dysfunctional they all are but they band together to survive' kind of approach? But I fucking hated everyone in this movie. I hate it anyway. This is why I don't watch soaps. Or Love Island. If I wanted to watch strangers argue, I'd go to the pub. But if it was intentional, it was the worst stylistic choice for this kind of movie. And it was just so oblivious. Literally there is ash raining down from the sky, fires, lava rising up out of the ground, but this is the perfect time to whine and bitch about how shitty you've been treated. Oh just piss the fuck off.

So yeah, I don't know if owing to that, or owing to the fact that is was intended to compensate for how insufficient everybody was at acting, but as a result I can't confidently say that anybody acted particularly well in this thing. It was just so cringe to watch. Second hand embarrassing watching these people trying to pretend they were an emotionally damaged family. About the only person scrapping through this thing with any dignity and respect as a actor left is Vlasta Vrana and I think it's only owing to the fact that he was playing the 5th least important person in this movie.

It was also filmed really unsettling and uncomfortably. Like there was a handful of times when there was some pretty decent and imaginative camera work, but it was more than swamped by a plethora of times where everything was filmed sort of wildly off centre for some reason? Or painfully up close. And a couple of occasions where I'm pretty sure whoever was filming didn't really know how to operate a camera as the foreground was out of focus? Or it was at some bizarre wonky angle? It just slapped of complete unprofessionalism.

Stock footage. I hope you like it cos there is a lot of it going on here, and ok. Fine. It's not the easiest thing in the world to create and film a lava flow. Fair enough. Even digitally creating one on a computer. So that's fine, your fall back is stock footage. But at least try to make it less obvious!? Some of it was so grainy it was so obviously from the 80's or something! Some of it didn't even really add that much context to the movie, it was just sandwiched in there to pad out the run time.

And I'm not even going to go into detail on the plot holes and the inconsistencies. I just... I'm out of effort to be honest. I just wanted this to be over. I don't groan very often at movies but at 40 minutes in, Emma turns to her mum with a face like a trout and starting whinging like a child about her pushing her step-dad away and I just wanted to turn it off right then. I had had enough. This was apparently about a lava storm? But it really plays second fiddle to a movie portraying a family so incredibly wrapped up in their own selfish bullshit that even in the face of almost, absolute certain death, they still find moments to... I'm running out of adjectives for moan... moan for their own self-fulfilling satisfaction about whichever other person they happen to be sharing oxygen with at that given moment. Total bum gravy. I was gonna give it a star for set design but nah, bollocks. Zero.