10.0 Earthquake – Not Even a Guilty Pleasure

Length: 88 minutes

Release Date: October 15, 2014

Rating: NR

Director: David Gidali

Gladstone is a seriously crazy scientist, even more crazy than Jeffrey Jones who plays him. Seriously, if you don't know what happened to the principal from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, now is not the time to look him up. He finds evidence that a massive earthquake will hit Los Angeles, but because he's a lunatic, no one believes him. Cut to the basic plot of San Andreas.

Jack is a divorced guy who works in fracking and loves to talk about how it's not dangerous to the environment. He and his daughter had plans for the night, but when he stops to pick her up from his ex-wife's house, he finds that she already made plans to spend the next few days camping with her friends. I don't know about you, but there is no way my parents would have let my 16 year old self go to a national forest with two random guys and another girl for an unsupervised camping trip. Upset at being left out and for his daughter not caring, Jack goes back to work.

Emily is a brand new environmental scientist sent to work in Los Angeles. She arrives just in time to wind that the organization has a lack of funding and basically just one other person working there. When the first tremors hit, she rushes to find Gladstone after hearing that he has a theory about what's going on. Cue the two of them rushing around Los Angeles to try and help as no one believes them.

Jack's daughter, who I literally cannot remember the name of – nor the names of any of her friends, goes off camping. We have the stereotypical nerdy guy who actually wants to talk to her dad about fracking and the environment. That naturally makes him the butt of every joke and makes me wonder why he bothered going on the trip and why they even invited him. We also have the jock guy who goes for the daughter and winds up screwing her best friend when he gets rejected, the whiny best friend character, and some other random douche bag. When they get trapped because of the quakes, Jack and his ex-wife reunite to save her.

I've seen a lot of bad movies and can usually find some redeeming qualities, but 10,0 Earthquake is just another forgettable film. As much as I love natural disaster movies, this one takes a little too much inspiration from San Andreas, which is one of my guilty pleasure movies. Seriously, I bought a copy during the Black Friday sale at Target and have watched it like three times since then. The only differences are that San Andreas had a way bigger budget and no crazy geologist or environmental scientists.

Henry Ian Cusick is one of the few redeeming features though. As someone who recently watched the entire first four seasons of Scandal, it's nice to see him back on screen, even if it's in something like this. Cameron Richardson, who I loved on the underrated Harper's Island, doesn't do nearly as well with her Emily. She's pretty much just there, and I'm a little surprised that I even remembered her name. If you're in the mood for a guilty pleasure earthquake movie, pop in San Andreas instead.

Christmas Icetastrophe TV Movie Review – The Cold is A Coming

Runtime: 86 minutes

Release Date: December 20, 2014

Rating: NR

Director: Jonathon Winfrey

Anyone who ever visited or read my blog in the past knows that I have a soft spot in my heart for bad disaster movies. That is exactly why I grabbed Icetastrophe, also known as Christmas Icetastrophe, the first time I saw it in Family Video.

Charlie (Victor Webster) is a man living in a small town when disaster strikes. The sky suddenly opens up and releases a torrent of ice and snow on the town. What actually happens, according to the film anyway, is that a meteor somehow causes a major atmospheric change on earth. A piece of the meteor breaks away and hits just outside of town. This causes the temperature to drop and wreaks havoc on Charlie's town.

There are tons of other stories going on in the same film. Charlie's son goes crazy after finding out that his rich girlfriend is lost in the cold with her brother, so he goes off to chase her down. Charlie's wife is stuck in the community center with the girl's mother and trying to find out what happened to both their kids. Oh, and the girl's father is more concerned with saving himself than dealing with anything else. There's also a grad student from a nearby university who shows up in town and asks Charlie to help her find the meteor.

Icetastrophe is really pretty bad and not necessarily bad in a good way. Having just finished Continuum on Netflix, I kept seeing people in this movie, wondering what I knew them from, and looking them up to see that there were on Continuum. I really think that the producers of that show had some extra cash leftover and decided to just use some of the cast to make a bad TV movie.

Of all the cheesy scenes in the movie, the cheesiest involves Charlie and the grad student. The two are in the midst of running away from the freeze, which is apparently taking over the entire town, when they get to a lake. They hop on a boat, speed across the lake, and look back to see the lake freezing behind them. It definitely gives new meaning to the term cold front.

Webster is probably better in this movie than he is in other stuff. I still remember him from his time on the soap opera Days of Our Lives, which I think every girl in my college dormitory watched, but he has a tendency to either be good or be really wooden. He's actually a little stronger in this movie than he is in other roles, though still not as good as he is on Continuum. The rest of the actors in the movie are just kind of there. I can't really highlight any one specific person because most are generally forgettable.

Icetastrophe, also known as Christmas Icetastrophe when it first aired, isn't nearly as much fun as I imagined it might be. It's just another one of those television movies that I watch once and promptly forget about.

LA Apocalypse Movie Review – LA Has Nothing to Worry About

Runtime: 80 minutes

Release Date: December 20, 2014

Rating: NR

Director: Michael J. Sarna

Calvin is just your typically 20 something living in Los Angeles and planning to propose to his girlfriend when all hell breaks loose. He had everything all set up to pop the question to Ashley (Gina Holden, Final Destination 3) later that night, but an earthquake stops him in his tracks. At the same time, Ashley is stuck in her office when disaster strikes. She and her coworkers wind up trapped in the basement with nearly dead cell phones.

To make matters worse, the earthquake did enough damage to the local jail/prison that a group of inmates escaped. Some side with the king pen drug dealer, while others just want to get the hell out of town. There's also a group of soldiers called in by the government to help the survivors. I think that was just an excuse to put Christopher Judge in the movie as a lieutenant.

After spending way too much time running around and moaning because he can't get in touch with Ashley, Calvin finally meets Grisham, Judge's character. The two help each other until they wind up separated, which leads to Grishman spending most of the movie trying to save both Ashley and Calvin because he claims he owes them or something.

LA Apocalypse should be right up my alley. As much as I love me some horror flicks, I also love me some disaster movies. This one was just bad. After it ended, my friend looked at me and said something to the effect of how it wasn't as bad as some of the stuff I made him watch, while I stuck to my original opinion that it was just bad.

This is the kind of movie that milks way too much out of specific scenes. Take for instance Ashley and her coworkers. They're trapped in the building, reach for their cell phones, and conveniently find that everyone has an almost dead battery. That's something that should only take 60 seconds at most but turns into a five minute long scene. We then come back to find that instead of turning off their phones to save their batteries, they decided that everyone should try to make one phone call each. Uh, if your phone doesn't work, why would the next phone?

This is really just so Ashley can make one phone call and leave Calvin a message. He, of course, then spends 10 minutes running around town to try and listen to the message before deciding that he must save her at any cost. It might work if the two had any chemistry or the film set up their relationship first, but nope. All we know is that he wanted to propose. We know nothing else about them or even see them interacting until the last minute or so of the movie.

Oh, and did I mention that Calvin later gets saved by a hot woman who conveniently knows a little too much about the city's penal system and all the convicts currently on the loose? Ugh. That's the best word to describe LA Apocalypse: ugh.

"Super Cyclone" Movie Review – A Storm's A Coming

Runtime: 89 minutes

Release Date: September 18, 2012

Rating: NR

Director: Liz Adams

Somewhere in the ocean is an oil rig that is drilling for oil. Big surprise, right? They hit a volcano on the ocean floor that someone turns into a massive cyclone that heads toward land. Someone who works for the oil company wants to help stop the storm because he wants to save the men still on the rig, while another woman (Ming Na) has to try and help too.

That is probably the worst synopsis I ever wrote for a film, but that's because this film really doesn't have a lot going on. The entire film just feels like an excuse for the filmmakers to cram in as many unrealistic moments as possible into one film. For no reason that anyone can explain, the sky suddenly catches on fire. The characters in the film just use that moment to explain why they need to amp up their efforts to stop the storm.

We also get a few scenes where the wind is strong enough to pick up a massive truck and tip it over or knock over a thousand ton boat, but the wind doesn't make Na's hair move even an inch. Not to mention the men on the oil rig. They are a major component of the film because they're the ones who drilled into the volcano. They appear in multiple scenes, trying to help stop the storm, and we get multiple scenes of people talking about how important it is that they save those men. Want to guess what finally happens to them? They decide to jump overboard into the fiery ocean and die.

By the time that scene hit, my boyfriend and I looked at each other and asked why we were still bothering to watch it. Though we did wind up finishing the movie, both of us were just waiting for the credits to start rolling.