Dante's Peak - Just leave Grandma, please.

Stinker Madness - The Bad Movie Podcast

Our second of back to back "stupid volcano movies from 1997" is the possibly the least disastery of any disaster movies ever created. Spoiler alert - body count is 5 and a tiny hick town gets cleared off the map. It's fine since they were just a bunch of smug buttholes anyways.

So if Volcano should have been named "Lava; Not Volcano Really", then Dante's Peak should have been called "Volcano; No Lava Really". It's a perfect mirror in opposite land. The volcano is HUGE but has very little lava. In fact the only thing that lava kills in this film is some truck tires. Very strange.

In the film Volcano, the disaster is at least disastrous, somewhat. In Dante's Peak its very not that way. A town of about 3000 people gets wiped out but only 4 people die due to the volcano; 3 of them didn't even live there and one was an insane old bitch that NO ONE liked. It's pretty not disastrous; quite unlike the structure of this sentence.

Some notable features - the stupidest robot in a movie, an old hag who wants to bang a mountain, bad character naming (Harry and Terry), a mayor/coffee barista/horrible mom/town bicycle/news anchor, a chopper pilot who doesn't understand how choppers work, a pyroclastic cloud, some awful Mayor Wando vision, human soup, a splitting headache, and multiple climaxes.

It's really stupid, horribly cliche, looks terrible, poorly written, and fairly uneventful. But somehow it makes for a ton of fun, IF and ONLY IF you have a great group of riffers sitting next to you. The film is just to boring to do by yourself, but because so little happens when something should be happening it's possibly the easiest movie to mock while viewing we've seen in quite some time (possibly since Q: The Winged Serpent). Its so riffable that we are going to add a new ratings category just for Riffability - 5/5.