As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasionally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow!
If you want to join this watch party, just hop onto Mastodon, pull up A Better Tomorrow on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag!
A German film from 1970, o.k. opens with a black-and-white shot of a group of men walking into a two-story house that’s sitting near a forest. The camera tracks them as they walk through the front hallway and enter a larger room. Uniforms of the U.S. Army hang on a rack in the room. Members of a film crew greet the men. A young woman sits quietly at a window and looks at the forest outside.
One by one, the men turn to the camera and introduce themselves. They give their name, their age, their religion, and their marital status. Two say that they are Roman Catholic but are no longer members of the Church. One Protestant says that he also no longer attends services. Another actor introduces himself as being a 28-year-old virgin and then briefly looks as if he regrets his candor. Director Michael Verhoeven joins the men to explain that the film we are about to see was filmed in Bavaria but it takes place in Vietnam. The film is based on an actual incident that occurred in 1966, when the Vietnam War was still in its early stages. While on patrol, four soldiers abducted, raped, and killed a young Vietnamese girl. Only one soldier refused to take part and reported the incident to his superiors, all of whom said that it was simply the type of incident that takes place in all wars.
(Known as the Incident on Hill 192, this crime also served as the basis of Brian De Palma’s far more straightforward Casualties of War.)
I have to admit that my first reaction to this was to think, “I’m not sure if I’m in the mood to be lectured about war crimes by the Germans.” However, one gets the feeling that Verhoeven himself knew that this would be the reaction of quite a few viewers and he was prepared for it. His actors explain that they didn’t film in Vietnam because Vietnam is “far away.” Instead, they filmed in Bavaria because “Here is closer.” I found myself thinking about that turn of phrase quite a bit as I watched o.k. “Here is closer.” o.k. may have been inspired by what happened in Vietnam but it was also about what happens in every war. The American soldiers, who have lost their humanity to war, all have American names but the actors make no effort to hide their German accents. The Vietnamese girl who was killed is played by German actress Eva Mattes and, again, no attempt is made to hide the fact that she is German. The characters emerge as universal soldiers and universal victims, playing out the same cycle, war after war. Verhoeven is not attacking America. He’s portraying the cost of tossing people into a situation where they have no control over their fates. The soldiers adopt a philosophy of kill-or-be-killed. Civilians, like Phan Ti Mao (played by Mattes), have no choice but to try to live in the middle of a war zone. The film is simply-told and starkly shot. We are continually reminded that we are watching a film, a production. We’re put at a distance and asked to just consider the film’s story and message without having the benefit of any of the usual war movie clichés or adrenaline-fueled action scenes to provide us with an emotional escape. Here is closer.
o.k. engendered more than a little controversy when it was released. It was entered into the 1970 Berlin Film Festival. Director George Stevens was the head of the jury that year and he led an effort to have the movie removed from competition. He cited a festival by-law that stated that the films at the festival should “contribute to a better understanding between nations.” When the jury voted 7-2 to remove o.k., the other filmmakers at the festival withdrew their films in solidarity and the Berlin Film Festival was canceled for that year. o.k. was later submitted as Germany’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar (as it was known back then) but it was not nominated.
Seen today, o.k. can sometimes seem a bit too studied for its own good but again, that was the point. It was a film that was deliberately made to force the audience to consider the production’s anti-war message without the benefit of easy sentiment. That said, it makes its argument effectively. It’s a film that epitomizes its own difficult era.
1972’s AWOL tells the story of an American soldier named Willy (Russ Thacker) who decides that he’s no longer going to fight in Vietnam. He goes to Sweden and informs the police that he has decided to desert. The bored policeman tells him to stay out of trouble. “No narcotics,” he says. “Of course,” Willy says, shocked to discover just how easy it is to desert.
Willy struggles to adapt to life in Sweden. At first, he has fun seeing the sights and wearing a silly little hat and visiting the carnival. Unfortunately, he has little money and no friends, and he soon finds himself feeling lonely. A job working on an adult film leads to him meeting another American expatriate, Mohammed G (Glynn Thurman). Mohammed introduces Willy to his friends, a group of rather shallow Leftists. Willy starts a relationship with Inga (Isabella Kaliff). They don’t agree on the merits of Che Guevara, but they fall in love anyway.
(Just a quick sidenote: Che was a racist butcher who executed thousands of innocent Cubans and who is only remembered today because of one good picture and the fact that he was executed by the Bolivians. The fact that he’s held up as some sort of icon is proof of just how shallow most political activists actually are.)
Meanwhile, the CIA wants Willy to come back home. A corpulent agent with the name of Cupp (Dutch Miller) continually appears and tries to bribe Willy into returning. He promises that nothing bad will happen to Willy if he returns to America. At worst, he’ll be required to do a few months of therapy. When that doesn’t work, Cupp drags Willy to his station house and has Willy’s parents appear on television. There’s a big moose head on the wall of the station house and its eyes glow red.
AWOL‘s a bit of an odd film, which should not be taken to mean that it’s necessarily an interesting film. The tone is all over the place. Willy and Mohammed discuss America and whether or not they can love the country from which they’ve fled. Cupp appears and uses a mini-camera hidden in his class ring to take pictures of Willy and Inga. Willy and Inga get a falling in love montage, complete with a syrupy ballad. Cupp offers Willy a briefcase full of American candy bars and soft drinks. There is footage of a demonstration. There are moments of goofy humor, and Russ Thacker wanders through the film with a somewhat dazed look on his face, a Vietnam-era Candide, a stranger in a Swedish land. The film ends on a dark note, leaving one to wonder if the film is trying to punish us for smirking at the shallowness of its politics. It’s not necessarily a good film, but it is definitely a film of its time.
AWOL was directed by Herb Freed, who got his start in commercials and later went on to direct the classic slasher, Graduation Day. The film was obviously meant to appeal to a combination of hippies and fans of Swedish sex films. That said, the sex is fairly tame and the film itself doesn’t seem to really have much affinity for the counterculture. If anything, the film’s Leftists come across as being so self-righteous that they make the openly amoral CIA agent seem likable by comparison. It’s tempting to compare this film to An American Hippie In Israel. An American Hippie was also a counter-culture film about a soldier who was traumatized by Vietnam and, like AWOL, it was tonally all over the place. But An American Hippie In Israel worked because, whatever else you might want to say about it (and I love the film), it’s actually sympathetic to the main character and his plea for people to “stop pushing buttons.” AWOL, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to even like Willy, much less understand him.
AWOL is very much a film of its time and, when it is interesting, it’s interesting as a portrayal of the early 70s. It’s a time capsule, one that is fit to be dug up and investigated at least once before being forgotten about again.
The year was 1977 and Don Letts had a video camera.
Letts was the DJ at The Roxy, a nightclub in London that gained some notoriety by hosting Punk acts like Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Generation X, and several others. In his role as DJ, Letts is often credited with introducing British punks to Jamaican reggae. (I’ve occasionally seen it misreported that Letts himself was from Jamaica. Letts commented in an interview that, until he visited the country with Johnny Lydon, the closest he had come to Jamaica was watching The Harder They Come.) As an amateur filmmaker, Letts was responsible for making one of the key documentaries about the early days of Punk Rock, 1978’s The Punk Rock Movie.
Shot largely at the Roxy, The Punk Rock Movie features raw but candid footage of some of the key Punk bands. Sex Pistols are there, of course. The Clash get a lot of footage and it’s interesting to see the young members of the band doing something other than screeching about imperialism. Billy Idol appears and shows off the rough charisma that would make him a star. We watch as The Slits argue in rehearsal. Siouxsie Sioux both performs and appears backstage, playing the enigmatic Punk diva. We also see quite a few Punks acts who are no longer as well-remembered as The Clash or Sex Pistols. Even with the DIY, anti-star ethos of the Punk Rock era, stage presence counted for a lot. Some bands just naturally had it and some bands did not.
I watched The Punk Rock Movie on Tubi and the most frequent caption was one informing me that the lyrics were unintelligible due to the music. It was a caption that I saw so frequently that I found myself both predicting when it would pop up and laughing when it did so. The Punk Rock Movie is a raw film. Don Letts shot the footage with a Super 8 Camera and, as a result, there’s nothing slick about the film. The images are sometimes blurry. It can be hard to make out what everyone is saying. It’s a far cry from the type of carefully choreographed and meticulously shot concert footage that we’re used to seeing. Needless to say, that’s a good deal of the film’s appeal. It’s often said, perhaps incorrectly, that Punk was started as a reaction to the commercialization of rock. At a time when soulless hitmakers and aging millionaires were dominating music, Punk came along with a burst of anger and vitality. The Punk Rock Movie captures that youthful anger. It captures the feeling of people refusing to accept that only a certain few were allowed to make music or express themselves. Scenes of the police raiding a Punk store add a political element of the film while the backstage and tour bus footage serve to remind us of just how English the original Punks were.
It’s no surprise that Sex Pistols dominate the film. We don’t see them backstage but we don’t have to. All we have to do is see Johnny Rotten (as he was known then) staring out at the audience. One of the more interesting thing about Punk is that the Sex Pistols were sold as being a band that didn’t know how to play their instruments or sing. This film reveals that, for whatever they lacked in formal training, they were naturals on stage. Regardless of what Malcolm McLaren and the press may have insisted, they were born to be stars.
J.T. Walsh is one of the great character actors of all time. Born on September 28th, 1943, he died way too young at just 54 years of age. You could count on him being good in any role, but I always appreciated him appearing with Billy Bob Thornton at the beginning and end of SLING BLADE (1996). He filmed his scenes about 15 miles from my house.
In Volcano, Los Angeles does not just face an earthquake, fire, or some ordinary civic emergency—it finds itself threatened by a river of lava tearing through the heart of the city. Directed by Mick Jackson, the 1997 disaster movie takes a premise that is almost impossible to accept on paper and sells it through speed, scale, and the sheer force of Tommy Lee Jones barking orders at people. A volcano erupting beneath Los Angeles, near the La Brea Tar Pits no less, is not exactly a model of scientific credibility. Still, the film is energetic enough to make its absurdity part of the entertainment.
The setup is wonderfully direct. An earthquake rattles Los Angeles, workers begin dying in underground tunnels, and a strange source of extreme heat is discovered beneath the city. Before long, lava is spilling into the streets, buildings are catching fire, and the city’s Emergency Management director Mike Roark, played by Tommy Lee Jones, has to coordinate an increasingly desperate effort to keep downtown Los Angeles from being wiped out. Anne Heche plays Dr. Amy Barnes, the geologist who realizes that the city is dealing with more than an earthquake or a gas leak. Together, Roark and Barnes become the film’s central problem-solving team: he is the practical, politically frustrated municipal leader, while she is the scientific expert trying to explain the impossible thing happening under everyone’s feet.
What makes Volcano enjoyable is that it does not waste much time pretending to be a subtle character drama. The movie’s main concern is escalation. Every time the heroes think they have contained the problem, the lava finds another way to spread. It comes through the subway. It crashes through pavement. It turns a normal Los Angeles intersection into a landscape from hell. The film understands the simple pleasure of watching ordinary urban infrastructure become a weapon or a liability. A train tunnel, a concrete barrier, construction equipment, storm drains, and even a city block all become parts of an enormous improvised plan to redirect molten rock.
Mick Jackson directs the action with enough urgency that the movie often works even when the science is wobbling badly. The special effects are very much of their era, combining practical fire, miniatures, digital lava, and lots of actors reacting to bright orange light. Some of the CGI has aged about as gracefully as one would expect from 1997, but the physical effects still have impact. The lava itself has a thick, almost muscular quality in the film. It does not just look like glowing liquid; it moves like an unstoppable wall that eats concrete, cars, and people. The images of lava flooding Los Angeles streets remain the reason to watch the movie. They are absurd, but memorably absurd.
The film also benefits from treating the crisis as a citywide emergency rather than simply a personal survival story. Roark is not a scientist, soldier, or superhero. He is basically a city official who has to make decisions under impossible conditions, manage multiple agencies, argue with politicians, and keep people from panicking. Tommy Lee Jones is perfect casting for that role. He has the right mixture of exhaustion, irritation, authority, and reluctant decency. Jones does not play Roark as a polished action hero; he plays him like a man who had plans for a quiet weekend with his daughter and instead ends up trying to stop Los Angeles from being buried under lava. His natural gruffness gives the movie more weight than it might otherwise have.
Anne Heche brings a different energy as Amy Barnes. Her character is often stuck delivering exposition, explaining volcanic activity, underground pressure, and why everyone is probably about to die, but Heche commits to it. She gives Amy enough urgency and intelligence that the scientific dialogue feels less like a lecture and more like another kind of emergency response. The relationship between Roark and Amy is also refreshingly restrained. The movie could have forced a big romantic subplot between them, but it mostly keeps their connection professional. They respect each other because they are both good at their jobs, which is more interesting than a last-minute disaster-movie love story.
The supporting cast is solid as well. Don Cheadle has a memorable role as Emmit Reese, a subway supervisor who becomes one of Roark’s most important allies. Keith David also adds welcome presence as a police lieutenant helping coordinate the response. Gaby Hoffmann plays Roark’s daughter Kelly, and while the daughter-in-peril material is fairly standard, it gives Jones’s character an emotional stake outside the command center. The film occasionally leans hard on familiar disaster-movie formulas, including separated family members, skeptical officials, and civilians making terrible decisions near obviously dangerous lava, but that is part of the package. Volcano is not trying to reinvent the genre. It is trying to make the genre run hot and fast for 104 minutes.
It is hard not to compare Volcano with Dante’s Peak, the other major volcano disaster movie released earlier in 1997. Dante’s Peak at least tries to ground its eruption in recognizable volcanic warning signs, scientific procedure, and the danger of officials ignoring experts until it is too late. Even when it becomes exaggerated, the film wants viewers to feel that its disaster could plausibly grow out of real geological conditions. Volcano, on the other hand, does not have much interest in maintaining that kind of credibility. Its premise is already much wilder: molten lava suddenly emerging beneath one of the largest cities in the United States. Rather than fight that inherent silliness, Mick Jackson’s film leans into it. Where Dante’s Peak aims for science-flavored suspense, Volcano goes for spectacle, turning Los Angeles itself into a giant disaster-movie set piece.
The biggest issue is that the movie never really decides how seriously it wants to take itself. At times, it is a grim urban catastrophe film in which people die in horrifying ways. One scene involving a transit worker trying to rescue another man from the lava is still surprisingly brutal and sad. At other times, Volcano is close to accidental comedy, especially whenever the film attempts to explain its geology with complete confidence. The idea of a full-scale volcanic eruption beneath Los Angeles is already a major stretch, but the movie goes beyond that into a kind of aggressively convenient science. The lava moves where the plot needs it to move, barriers hold until they need to fail, and the city seems able to mobilize massive engineering projects at a speed that would make any real emergency planner laugh.
Still, questioning the realism too closely misses the appeal. Volcano belongs to that specific 1990s era when major studios were throwing big budgets at destruction spectacles with recognizable stars and high-concept premises. The movie is essentially a monster film where the monster is a river of lava rolling through Los Angeles. Instead of a creature smashing buildings, it is molten rock swallowing streets, derailing infrastructure, and forcing ordinary people to run for their lives.
The movie is also unintentionally revealing about late-1990s disaster filmmaking. It has a strong faith in public-service workers, engineers, transit employees, firefighters, police officers, and regular people doing dangerous jobs because somebody has to do them. Roark’s strategy is not to defeat nature through one genius solution. It is to coordinate an enormous group effort, with people hauling concrete barriers, driving equipment, evacuating neighborhoods, and taking risks to buy the city more time. That civic-minded quality gives the film a little more heart than its reputation as a silly lava movie might suggest.
In the end, Volcano is neither a great disaster movie nor a completely disposable one. It is too scientifically goofy to be taken seriously as a realistic thriller, and its dialogue can be very blunt. Yet it has pace, personality, some genuinely effective spectacle, and a reliably entertaining Tommy Lee Jones performance at its center. It is the kind of movie where a man can face a molten river in downtown Los Angeles and somehow make you believe that yelling louder might solve the problem. For viewers in the mood for a big, fiery, unapologetically 1990s popcorn movie, Volcano remains a fun eruption of chaos.
In this scene, from Arthur Penn’s 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, Bonnie Parker (played by Faye Dunaway) writes a poem and tries to craft the future image of Bonnie and Clyde. Though it has none of the violence that made Bonnie and Clyde such a controversial film in 1967, this is still an important scene. (Actually, it’s more than one scene.) Indeed, this scene is a turning point for the entire film, the moment that Bonnie and Clyde goes from being an occasionally comedic attack on the establishment to a fatalistic crime noir. This is where Bonnie shows that, unlike Clyde, she knows that death is inescapable but she also knows that she and Clyde are destined to be legends.
(Of course, Dunaway and Warren Beatty — two performers who once epitomized an era but who are only seen occasionally nowadays — are already legends.)
4 (or more) Shots From 4 (or more) Films is just what it says it is, 4 (or more) shots from 4 (or more) of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 (or more) Shots From 4 (or more) Films lets the visuals do the talking.
104 years ago today, Arthur Penn was born in Philadelphia. In the 50s, Penn was one of the new crop of directors who made a name for themselves directing for television. Like most of his colleagues, he transitioned into film. Unlike many of his colleagues, he remained a fiercely iconoclastic director, one who was willing to challenge the conventions of Hollywood. While his early films often struggled at the box office, he was respected by actors and hailed as a visionary by the directors of the French New Wave.
In 1967, he and Warren Beatty changed the course of American cinema with Bonnie and Clyde. Penn followed up that classic film with movies like Alice’s Restaurant, Little Big Man, Night Moves, and a handful of others. When he died in 2010, Penn was hailed as one of the most influential (if sometimes underrated) directors of all time.
Today, in honor of the anniversary of his birth, the Shattered Lens offers up….
4 Shots From 4 Arthur Penn Films
The Chase (1966, dir by Arthur Penn, DP: Joseph LaShelle)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967, dir by Arthur Penn, DP: Burnett Guffey)
Alice’s Restaurant (1969, dir by Arthur Penn, DP: Michael Nebbia)
Little Big Man (1970, dir by Arthur Penn, DP: Harry Stradling Jr)
“Not extinct, just dormant… as in sleeping. And your volcano might just be waking up.” — Harry Dalton
Dante’s Peak takes a simple but reliable disaster-movie setup—a quiet town sitting beneath a volcano that is very much not as dormant as everyone hopes—and turns it into a tense, highly watchable piece of 1990s spectacle. Directed by Roger Donaldson, the 1997 film is hardly subtle, and its character work can be pretty thin, but it remains an unusually watchable entry in the genre because it takes its central threat seriously. The movie spends enough time establishing the town and its people that, once the mountain finally blows, the destruction has some weight behind it. It is a familiar formula, but Dante’s Peak executes it with enough sincerity and old-school craftsmanship to stay entertaining.
Pierce Brosnan stars as Harry Dalton, a volcanologist for the U.S. Geological Survey who is still carrying the emotional scars of a prior eruption that killed his fiancée. Harry is sent to the picturesque Pacific Northwest town of Dante’s Peak after unusual seismic and chemical activity suggests that its supposedly dormant volcano may be waking up. His assignment initially sounds routine: inspect the mountain, collect some samples, talk to local officials, and determine whether there is any reason for concern. Naturally, there is. The water supply starts showing signs of dangerous acidity, tremors grow more frequent, steam vents become harder to ignore, and the mountain begins sending increasingly blunt warnings that it is ready to erupt.
The central tension is not whether the volcano will blow. The title alone pretty much gives that away. Instead, the first half works because of the fight over how seriously the warning signs should be taken. Dante’s Peak has just received national attention as one of the best small towns in America, and Mayor Rachel Wando, played by Linda Hamilton, is understandably hesitant to cause mass panic and wreck the town’s economy over an uncertain prediction. Harry believes the danger is real, but he also knows from painful experience that hesitation can get people killed. That conflict gives the movie a decent human foundation before the large-scale effects take over.
Brosnan is a good fit for Harry Dalton. This was the same period when he was newly established as James Bond, and Dante’s Peak makes smart use of his natural screen presence without turning Harry into an outright action hero. He is calm, capable, handsome, and articulate, but he is also clearly rattled by the possibility of repeating a tragedy he could not prevent. The role is not especially demanding on paper, yet Brosnan gives Harry enough fatigue and frustration that he comes across as a real professional rather than just a disaster-movie scientist whose only job is to shout warnings at dismissive bureaucrats.
Hamilton is arguably even more important to the movie’s success. Rachel could have been written as a generic authority figure who slows down the plot by refusing to believe the expert, but Hamilton makes her more sympathetic than that. She is not ignoring Harry because she is foolish or selfish. She has a town to protect, businesses that depend on tourism, residents who do not want to abandon their homes, and two children who become central to the film’s increasingly dangerous rescue mission. Hamilton had already cemented her action credentials in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but here she plays a more grounded version of strength. Rachel is practical, stubborn, and brave without ever feeling like she has wandered in from another franchise with a shotgun and a leather jacket.
The supporting cast is more uneven. Charles Hallahan gets the familiar disaster-movie role of Paul Dreyfus, the superior whose skepticism creates a frustrating delay in the evacuation. Elizabeth Hoffman is memorable as Rachel’s grandmother, Ruth, even though the movie leans hard into the “stubborn elderly relative refuses to leave” setup. Rachel’s children, Lauren and Graham, mostly function as a way to push the adults back into danger after the eruption begins, and their choices can be maddening. Still, the cast sells the stakes well enough that the film avoids feeling completely mechanical.
Where Dante’s Peak really delivers is in its escalation. The first clear sign that things have gone wrong is genuinely creepy: the town’s supposedly pristine water supply turns corrosive. That detail is one of the movie’s best touches because it makes the volcano feel dangerous before it becomes visually spectacular. Then the film starts layering hazards on top of each other. There are earthquakes, falling volcanic debris, ash clouds, mudslides, a collapsing bridge, boiling water, and eventually a full eruption. It is an impressively varied disaster package. Rather than relying on one big explosion and calling it a day, the movie treats the volcano as a chain reaction that attacks the town from every direction.
The standout sequence is the drive across the lake after volcanic material has made the water acidic. It is ridiculous in the specific, memorable way that disaster cinema often is: a family in a damaged vehicle tries to outrun a lake that is essentially eating the vehicle out from under them. The science of the scene has been criticized plenty over the years, and fairly so, but it works as suspense filmmaking. Donaldson understands how to stage the moment visually, showing the immediate effects on the vehicle while keeping the characters trapped in a situation that gets worse by the second. It is the kind of scene people remember long after forgetting much of the dialogue.
Visually, the movie has aged better than some of its late-1990s peers because it balances computer-generated imagery with practical destruction, physical sets, and real locations. The effects do not always look flawless now, especially in wider shots of the erupting mountain, but the overall physicality helps. Buildings shake, roads split open, ash hangs in the air, and characters actually look buried in the mess rather than pasted in front of it. The town itself is also nicely chosen. Dante’s Peak looks like the sort of clean, friendly, postcard-perfect place that a disaster movie needs to destroy. The contrast between its calm opening scenes and its ash-covered final act is one of the film’s strongest visual ideas.
Roger Donaldson directs efficiently, even if he never quite gives the film a distinctive personality. He keeps the geography clear during most of the action, which matters a lot in a movie built around people trying to flee shifting dangers. You usually understand where Harry and Rachel are, what obstacle is in front of them, and why they cannot simply drive away. The pacing is a little slow in the middle, particularly when the scientific warnings begin repeating themselves, but that patience pays off once the final act kicks in. The movie takes a while to get to the eruption, then makes sure the eruption earns its screen time.
The screenplay by Leslie Bohem is where Dante’s Peak shows its limitations. The dialogue is often blunt, the romance between Harry and Rachel is predictable, and several characters exist mainly to make unwise decisions at the exact moment the plot needs more danger. The film also has a habit of making Harry right about nearly everything, which can flatten the debate around whether to evacuate. Still, there is something likable about how earnestly it embraces its own premise. It never winks at the audience or tries to become ironic. It wants viewers to care about the town, fear the mountain, and cheer when people narrowly escape certain death.
That sincerity is probably why Dante’s Peak has endured better than its mixed critical reputation might suggest. It is not a great disaster movie in the way that The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno can be called great, and it does not have the full-throttle spectacle of Twister. But it is dependable comfort-viewing for anyone who enjoys this particular brand of high-stakes Hollywood nonsense. The movie’s science is questionable in spots, its family drama can get corny, and its plot follows the disaster handbook almost page for page. Yet Brosnan and Hamilton give it enough credibility, Donaldson keeps it moving, and the volcanic destruction is still satisfying.
In the end, Dante’s Peak is a solid, unpretentious disaster thriller that understands the appeal of watching ordinary people try to outrun an extraordinary catastrophe. It may not reinvent the genre, but it delivers the basics with conviction: a looming natural threat, decent leads, escalating tension, and a finale full of lava, ash, and desperate escapes. Sometimes that is more than enough.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on Twitter and Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 10 pm et, #ScarySocial presents a 1978 film starring Kirk Douglas. It’s a film that was released under several titles, including Rain of Fire and Holocaust 2000. On Prime, it’s called The Chosen.
If you want to join us this Saturday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
The Chosen is available on Prime! (Make sure the version you watch lists 1981 as the release date and Kirk Douglas as the star.) See you there!
