Disaster
Stonehenge Apocalypse: What's the disaster genre about?
BOOM! BLAM! SMASH! KABOOM!
There’s something so captivating about the end of the world. Pretty much ever since someone thought “hey, who needs a plot when I have special effects?”, the apocalyptic disaster has been a mainstay of the cinema world. It’s pretty much the ultimate one-upmanship in cinematic disaster terms (speaking on a terrestrial level at least). Why blow up a car when you could blow up a house? Why blow up a house when you could blow up a whole street? Why blow up a whole street when you could… And so on and so forth until someone says: “Let’s destroy the whole damn WORLD!”. And everyone high-fives him/her for their brilliant idea and they all go down the pub to have a drink and to bask in how awesome they are.
At least that’s how I imagine the boardroom discussions that precede a disaster movie.
From H.G.Wells’ War of the Worlds through to last year’s 2012, the disaster movie has a pedigree of at least 60 years. It’s risen and fallen in popularity over that time but, for a genre in which special effects play at least as large a part as characterisation, plot or any of that “traditional” stuff, as special effects improve the genre will find new heights. Or… it’ll find bigger and better explosions at the very least.
On the flip-side to this, though, is the fact that - as trashy low-content, low-brainpower movies, they fall squarely into the b-movie half of our (conceptual) cinematic Venn-diagram. As everyone know, B-movies and big-budgets do not exactly go hand in hand. This can spell awkward difficulties for the disaster movie, the very definition of a “the-more-cash-the-better(bigger)” genre.
So who will rise to the challenge and step up and create the low-budget disaster flick? Well… just about everyone in fact. There’s heaps of them. Puzzlingly, for a type of film whose continued existence is only validated by special-effects improvements, everyone seems to take a gleeful pride in churning out disaster movies with craptastic effects. Perhaps they’re confident that their obvious enthusiasm will override any technical issues. Perhaps even more surprisingly, this mostly seems to be true.
The film that sparked this post was the SyFy channel’s very own Stonehenge Apocalypse. There are certain things you expect from a SyFy original: bad acting, crap CG effects, a silly idea and 90 minutes of good, solid FUN. Stonehenge Apocalypse takes these values very much to heart and delivers each in spadefuls.
The basic plot-line is that all the world’s ancient monuments are connected by lay-lines (or something like that) and channel electro-magnetic fequencies all over the place. When Stonehenge moves and starts to vapourise people (yes!), the world begins to get worried; the British scientists want to study it, the British military want to nuke it and only the once-superstar-but-now-discredited physicist from Maine can offer an explanation. Except of course no-one listens to him because he’s waving around a device that looks like a portable tv and babbling about undiscovered ancient civilisations.
This film has quite literally everything you could ask for: Agressive ancient monuments, over-zealous military, a cult, gunfights, a lone hero who sees things clearly. And they blow stuff up too! I shan’t give away too much about which places get blown up (though would it really matter if I did?) except for the Pyramids (which I just HAD to include a picture of) and um,.. the ENTIRETY OF INDONESIA. We don’t really see Indonesia explode, but it’s passed off with a bit of a shrug; “oh yeah, Indonesia just exploded”.
So thank you SyFy channel; thank you for reminding me that actually I was wrong. THe disaster movie is not about the quality of the effects, not at all. The disaster movie is about blowing stuff up and having a lot of fun. Stonehenge Apocalypse ticked both those boxes.
A few of my favourite shots now:
THE PYRAMIDS EXPLODE! KABOOOM!
And a COmputer-Generated Plane! Wow!
Seriously, this film is brilliant. Go watch SYFY NOW! (Sky 129 in the UK)
Please remember to check out our new sister blog Cult Collage!
Terror on the 40th Floor
Sometimes, a review just doesn’t tell you whether you want to watch it. Sometimes, writing a review just isn’t appealing.
With these two things in mind, I present to you the ultimate im gimmick-y blog posting: the first 30 minutes of the film, blow by blow. There’s no spoilers (there’s hardly a plot), but hopefully it’ll give you an idea of whether you want to watch it (you don’t).
Here, then, is Terror on the 40th Floor. A disaster movie about a skyscraper. Die Hard, this ain’t.
29secs: Awesome synth tune kicks in. This has started well. And look! Father Christmas. It must be set at Christmas.
1min: The strings kick in. The music’s nice, but the credits are otherwise pretty dull.
2mins: There’s an office party going on and they’re all drunk.
3mins: Woman on the phone is arguing with her mum about whether she should be with her son,
rather than at the party. She probably should. This is all going to end badly.
5mins: A guy sneaks off with two girls and bursts in upon his morose father brooding in his office. They’re invited in for a drink.
6mins: It’s champagne. Wow.
7mins: Another guy burst in with two girls. Suddenly the party is relocating to the office.
8mins: Most of the drunken revellers are heading home, the security guard shepherds them out.
9mins: Kelly who should be locking up and checking the building is clear is encouraged out of the building by the boss.
10mins: Charley arrives and er… rather implausibly has been demanded to perform maintenance work on the building ON CHRISTMAS EVE.
11mins: Back to the remaining party group upstairs. Champagne flows as they begin to flirt…
12mins: Oh noes! Charley the maintenance man is drinking from a bottle of liquor! How terribly irresponsible. He just knocked something on the floor too.
13mins: More boring flirting. The dialogue is pretty crappy.
14mins: Charley is doing something strenuous in the dark. Not sure what. He takes another big swig of liquor.
15mins: Ahahaha, he just kicked over a tiny lantern, which set everything on fire. Including his legs. What a shame. The security guy is running around too.
16mins: Oh, the ambulance has arrived ever-so speedily. But one of them has already died. Hard luck, buddy. The other man, merely injured, was the security guard who has informed the emergency services that there’s no-one inside the building. BUT THERE IS!!!11!!!!
18mins: The fire has climbed seven floors in the last three minutes of film. What’s going to happen in the next 80 minutes?
20mins: There’s a little bit of boozy seduction going on here. And some comparison of notes between old flame and new.
20mins + 30secs: He has a wife! Eeek!
21mins: Guys are fighting fire. It’s not very clear what’s going on. Sirens wail. They’re cutting the power.
23mins: He seducing her by describing the boardroom. What a player…
24mins: The music’s gone really dramatic… not a lot’s happening though. Until…. Snogging!
25mins: Ah! But up comes the topic of his wife.
26mins: Hazy flash-back (or is it flash-forward) to games of badminton in the sunshine. And then she drops the bomb: “Jim.. I…I’m pregnant”
28mins: “So.. we can have an abortion or get married?”
29mins: He’s gotta think about it.
29mins: Back to the now, sirens wail. Not a lot else is happening.
In conclusion: unless you’re gripped by these details and care about the cheating businessman or any of the other boring, thin characters… I really wouldn’t bother with this one.
Thank you and goodnight.
Nightmare City (Incubo sulla città contaminata)
Ok. First off we’ll do a quick Zombie-Survival, multiple-choice quiz question:
You are on the run from vicious, fast, flesh-eating, blood-drinking ghouls. And your escape-vehicle is running out of petrol. When you stumble upon a deserted looking petrol station, do you…
a)Fill your van at the pump, taking advantage of how there appears to be no-one around, and continue fleeing, or…
b)Pop in, have a rummage through the (presumably deceased) owner’s clothes and make yourself a cup of coffee, whilst dicussing how man’s greed has triggered this crisis. Upon discovering one of the zombies in the back garden, rather than running away, you attack it, alerting others to your presence, allowing them to find your car which you then firebomb, before escaping on foot with only a flask of brandy.
If you anwered a) you might stand a chance of survival. If you anwered b) you’ll die like the suckers in this film.
Oh look, there’s some glamourous dancers. What’ll happen to them, I wonder….?
Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City is both wonderful and awful, serious and silly. The characters are numerous and killed off so fast that we can’t really care very much about them; when the military lieutenant is forced to shoot his zombified wife through the head, we’re vaguely aware that this seems a shame, but it’s hardly a tragedy as none of the characters have enough time to create any depth or link with the watcher.
You can’t fault it on body count though. The monsters of the film might not be strictly zombies - they are victims of radiation who haven’t died and move incredibly fast (think 28days…) and wield weapons - but they certainly cause havoc, feed on blood and pass on their contamination to those that they injure. And the injure an awful lot of people!
The planned air-strike is somewhat derailed by the discovery of an entire airbase of dead pilots and the notquitezombies munch away at doctors, nurses, patients, soldiers, dancers and relatives with ample enthusiasm.
Plot-wise, this is little more than a vehicle for graphic violence and, although this sounds like a criticism, at least it’s fairly open in its lowly ambitions. Refreshingly unpretentious! So if we can’t rate a film on its plot, what can we use to evaluate it?
Why, the nature of the killings of course! Zombie movies are generally an excuse to be inventive and/or outrageous in terms of death scenes and this is fairly competent in this regard. Highlights include beating a vicar’s brains out on the altar, a harpoon through the chest and a scene with a rollercoaster that I won’t spoil…
Whch leads us to Zombie-Survival, multiple-choice quiz question number 2:
If, when fleeing a zombie-outbreak, you encounter an abandoned fairground do you…
a)wander in, or..
b)stay the hell away.
I’ll let you figure the answer to that one yourself…
