Josh Keown | Night Terror Novels 🧛🏻♂️’s review published on Letterboxd:
"When the left hand finally realizes what the right hand is doing, it's exploded in all of our faces."
-President Paul Holister (Beau Bridges)
Hello fellow Letterboxderites (*citation needed), it's been a while since I've been on this site! If by some slim chance anyone remains from back then, and the even slimmer chance that anyone actually remembers me, then hi! And hello to all the new guys and gals that have inevitably popped up over the past couple of years.
After taking an extended hiatus, which went on far longer than I'd had hoped, I thought it high time to get back into properly watching films again and reviewing them on here. And what better way to kick things of than with an apocalyptic disaster of a film! I mean, a disaster of an apocalyptic film! No, an apocalyptic disaster film, that's the one.
10.5 EARTHQUAKE and 10.5 APOCALYPSE. That's right, two. This is technically two separate made for TV movies, but I'm combining this review on account of them being equally as crap as each other.
...So ...I'm not going to bat around the bush with this one. They're bad movies. Really BAD movies, in-fact. Terribly Bloody Awful Disaster movies, that kind of bad. The Disaster Movie 'sub-genre' (if it can even be called that) is one I tend to avoid, as the majority of them, with the noted exceptions of The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 (which when taken as comedy satire, is as hilarious and euphoric a comedy as The Wicker Man remake), are absolute garbage. These are really no exception, despite having the... er... 'talents' of Beau Bridges and Kim Delaney on board. They reeks of Prime-time, made-for-TV drivel from its overwrought and melodramatic opening to the equally overwrought and melodramatic finale.
They are just silly and ridiculous the whole damn way through. Everything about them. The acting is a joke. The effects are a joke. And the way the cameraman insists on zooming in to a close up during every. Single. Shot. Is just about the biggest joke I've ever seen. Seriously, you could make a drinking game from it. An un-winnable drinking game that would almost certainly leave you with intense liver damage. I'm not sure they could have shot this any worse even if they actively tried to.
VERDICT; Actually worth watching, if piss poor disaster movies are your thing. This detestable duo are certainly up there as two of the worst, and there have been some real baaad contenders over the years. That said, both films do their share of (however unintentional) hilarity. Take it from me, the cable car sequence in Apocalypse is just sublime. It almost takes the biscuit for best cable car sequence in any film, but we all know Moonraker will always hold that crown.
10.5 Earthquake; 2/5 or 4/10, D+
10.5 Apocalypse; 2/5 or 4/10, D+
Combined runtime (A.K.A. time I've wasted of my life) - 334 minutes; 5.5/5 or 10.5/10, A++
EDIT: And I'd forgotten how to italicize here. Disgraceful.