Dante's Peak (1997)

[HipGuide 196]

Twister/Dante's Peak double feature live episodes?

[Quarky 9]

I don't remember much of Dante's Peak but one thing I distinctly remember is the boat disinitegrating, and the grandma gets out and (unneccessarily) starts to the pull the boat to shore in the acidic water.

[PhillipMedoc 648]

Dante's Peak is good, especially the part where the Grandma is carrying her son through a river of lava (or was it boiling water? I can't remember), screaming in agony, and then dies. Thanks Grams! This movie is a good entry in the genre of impending environmental disaster movies in which nobody believes the scientist because the town needs to have a summah.

 

HOWEVER

 

Mrs C&B is a geologist, and so I have watched every goddamned movie in which a volcano, earthquake, or some seismic/tectonic event appears. I've seen them all. So I'd have to say the better choice for HDTGM is Volcano. First of all, was that the working title? You couldn't come up with anything better than that? But the real thing is, while Dante's Peak is pretty nuts, the acting is pretty solid and the actual science is usually better than most environmental disaster flicks (except that bit at the end where Pierce Brosnon skis down a lahar, what the shit) the science and explanations used in Volcano are all completely false, stupid, and obvious even to a guy like me with a liberal arts degree.

 

Volcano has it all: a terrible script, Anne Heche "acting", people doing CSI-style computer shit where they sit around smacking a keyboard while random charts and numbers scroll across the monitor, a racist LA cop who realizes racism is bad because volcano, a guy who slowly melts in lava like the Wicked Witch, a cheesy "we gotta go back and rescue the dog" scene (hey, thanks for using that one again, Man Of Steel), a go-nowhere subplot with the distant teenage daughter, obviously "evil" politicians, things exploding/catching fire inexplicably, terrible effects (rear projection in 1997?, etc etc. It's by far the most bonkers and well-known of any volcano-related film. Plus, it's called Volcano.

 

(As an aside, the solution in many of these movies (lots of dumb movies, actually) is to shoot missiles or bombs at them. You can't stop an earthquake with a nuclear bomb. You can't stop a sharknado with a bomb. You can't restart the sun by shooting shit at it.)

[PhillipMedoc 648]

I don't remember much of Dante's Peak but one thing I distinctly remember is the boat disinitegrating, and the grandma gets out and (unneccessarily) starts to the pull the boat to shore in the acidic water.

Okay, that was it; my memory's terrible. (Don't do drugs, kids.)

 

 

 

 

I gotta say, I don't know how much Xanax Leonard Maltin takes when he writes these reviews because he's almost always totally wrong.

[sillstaw 414]

(As an aside, the solution in many of these movies (lots of dumb movies, actually) is to shoot missiles or bombs at them. You can't stop an earthquake with a nuclear bomb. You can't stop a sharknado with a bomb. You can't restart the sun by shooting shit at it.)

 

Even further aside: I'd love to see a movie where they defuse a bomb by shooting a bomb at it.

[seanotron 2307]

Even though Dante's Peak was the more realistic of the two, I seem to remember enjoying Volcano more. Maybe because it embraced its stupidity so wholeheartedly. I mean, as far as unbelievable scientists go, Anne Heche isn't quite on the level of nuclear physicist Christmas Jones but she's still pretty bad.

[PhillipMedoc 648]

Even though Dante's Peak was the more realistic of the two, I seem to remember enjoying Volcano more. Maybe because it embraced its stupidity so wholeheartedly. I mean, as far as unbelievable scientists go, Anne Heche isn't quite on the level of nuclear physicist Christmas Jones but she's still pretty bad.

They're both enjoyable but Volcano is waaay more stupid, I agree with you.

 

The worst thing is that Anne Heche is supposed to beTommy Lee Jones' love interest. They have zero chemistry, at no point is their romance believable or even plausible.

[seanotron 2307]

They're both enjoyable but Volcano is waaay more stupid, I agree with you.

 

The worst thing is that Anne Heche is supposed to beTommy Lee Jones' love interest. They have zero chemistry, at no point is their romance believable or even plausible.

 

They definitely were not well matched. There's the age difference, and I think at this time she was in a relationship with Ellen, right? I know it wasn't too long after that she had a breakdown and claimed she was God, so maybe Volcano really is that bad.