MegaFault (2009)

I've been collecting the movies from Asylum for a while now and getting more and more surprised. There's still not much originality, but I never been in the movie-collecting business for unique experiences - even if I love those when I get a chance to see one. People who praises Asian and European rip-offs from the eighties and at the same time think it's disgusting to see The Asylum make a buck or two by doing the exact same thing are just hypocrites. This is what exploitation-movies are. I'm not saying Asylums movies are masterpieces, but I don't think the old classics in the genre are masterpieces either, and some of them are very bad - like Alien vs Hunter. Today I've seen MegaFault, an "original", story. But obviously inspired by 2012 (which makes it the third 2012-inspired movie from Asylum so far) and a lot of other older and new disaster movies. 

Brittany Murphy stars as Dr. Amy Lane, a geologist (or seismologist... or whatever) that together with her boss, Dr. Mark Rhodes (Bruce Davison) discovers that the world is about to end. After saving an explosives expert, Boomer (Eriq La Salle), from an early death, they together tries to stop the disaster: a hug crack in the world, threatening to go all around our dear globe (which echoes Andrew Martonäs lovely A Crack in the World from 1965) and killing us all! At the same time Dr Amy's family is in danger and of course she wants to save them to!

Not much of a story, but this is a competent made SyFy Channel-movie with a trio of good actors that don't sleep through their performances. Eriq La Salle could be the new black Arnold Vosloo (they have an uncanny resemblance in this movie) and Bruce Davison is a more than competent character-actor who gives some credibility to the movie. If I was heterosexual I would marry Brittany Murphy the way she was and looked ten years ago, but here she's not looking well at all. Thin and pale, and sometime it seems like she's shaking. But she still makes a good job, thought it probably was a paycheck-job. A sad thing she left us so early. 

But a disaster movie is all about the disasters of course. MegaFault is The Asylums most expensive movie so far, and it looks big and slick. But compared to 2012 it's a cheap, cheap movie. But we're treated to a lot of disasters, mostly earthquakes where the effects goes from primitive to really impressive. What makes them work even better is that the camera is moving all the time, either on the ground or during arial shots - so that fools us to believe it's more real than it is. A static shot in low budget movies like this are often less convincing, and director David Michael Latt knows his homework. The best stuff is the huge arial footage where cities and landscapes a crumbling underneath us, and some of the avalanche-stuff looks great too. There's also a volcano, but we see very little of this and the lava and heat-effects is quite boring. 

Not a bad b-movie at all, and now I'm waiting for 2012: Doomsday directly from my favorite Thai shop, so hopefully I'll be enjoying that movie in a week or so. But I'm sure there will be more The Asylum-movies until then, whether you like it or not!