Bad movies made worse.

[gridlore]

Last night ABC showed one of my favorite bad movies, Volcano. isomeme turned me on to this film, evidently Angelinos have a soft spot in their hearts for movies that destroy LA.

Any way, the move is about a volcano suddenly developing in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. Tommy Lee Jones plays the director of LA's Office of Emergency Management, and Anne Heche is a plucky geologist (with nice smooth hands that have never handled a rock in their lives.) After some very basic plot development, most of the movie is watching the volcano destroy LA.

Bad science all over the place, really bad acting from Heche, a script that Ed Wood would have discarded.. but fun. How did ABC make it worse?

They discarded and entire subplot. One of the characters is a plucky ER doctor who's evil, heartless boyfriend is developing this giant apartment building across from Ceder Sinai Hospital and the Beverly Center (are those two even close to each other?) He also wants his gf to give up her job and become a nice normal plastic surgeon or something. That entire plot is gone. Which removes some of the satisfaction when they drop the apartment building to divert the lava flow.

Also, they cut out the very end. At the end of the move, just as the credits roll, there's a shot of the LA basin with this traditional smoking cone volcano in the middle of it, and in one of the corners of the screen, it is identified as "Mt. Wilshire" and reported to be active. This is as Randy Newman's I Love LA plays. ABC cut to promos.

Time to save up for the DVD player.

Comments

[bunyip.livejournal.com]

This is why I don't watch movies on network TV in the US... movies are slashed and dubbed for no readily apparent reason except for political correctness.

[beki.livejournal.com]

IIrc, the two are within walking distance. It's been over 10 years since my moms liver transplant. We used to get weird looks because we used o walk there for a bit of a break after doing the hospital ho-down.

[johno.livejournal.com]

My favorite item in the movie was the reports of the freeways being totally jamed, yet they were able to get the concret barricades delivered in time to stop the lava flow. Then of course, they did stop lava flow.

Speaking of cuts, did they keep the firemen in the building?

[isomeme.livejournal.com]

Very nice to find out some Angeleno-ness is rubbing off on you.

Yes, Cedars is right next door to Beverly Center (I used to sneak Jamba Juices from Bev Center in to Lauri when she was last hospitalized), but the two of them are the better part of a mile north of Wilshire, and almost that far west of the drainage culvert they used. I didn't mind, nothing wrong with a little artistic license. Oh, and the drainage culvert becomes Ballona Creek, and passes about two blocks from where I lived at the time the movie came out...nice to see a ribbon of lava CGI'd into my neighborhood on its way to the Marina.

And what they did to the movie sounds like butchery. I have almost no tolerance for watching movies on 'normal' TV channels these days; between the commercials and the ham-fisted edits, it's just not worth the aggravation.

The fact that they cut that pay-off ending should be prosecuted as a crime against art. You should have heard the west LA theater crowd cheer!

By the way, if you haven't already, check out Mike Nelson's _Movie Megacheese_ book. He savages "Volcano" in a way only an MST3K principal could pull off and still make me laugh out loud.