I have to go back to uni soon, a prospect I’m not entirely looking forward to at the moment, given that I’ve just finished writing an essay. It feels a little like I’ve hardly had any stress-free time at home before having to dive back into the trials and tribulations of third year but I guess I just have to suck it up. I got to do some travelling and there will be plenty of time to lounge around the house once I graduate and start aimlessly looking for jobs. Urgh.
Anyway, because I’m heading back on Sunday, I got to pick the film to watch with my family tonight. We were torn between 2 films which, according to IMDb (my family uses this website to vet what new film we want to communally watch on weekend evenings), are both pretty crap. I picked the one with the crappier rating as I was in the mood for pointing and laughing at someone else and so it came to be that I encountered Geo-Disaster (Heh. Guess what genre it was).
WARNING: SPOILERS FOR GEO-DISASTER. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.
My prior experiences of watching crap films (Blood Stone, Power Rangers and Sharknado 1 and 2) have led me to recognise that, often, what truly makes a crap film hilarious is poor dialogue, typically in combination with bad/ridiculous acting. I already knew going into the film that the CGI was reputably crap and I was fully prepared to giggle my way through it.
However, I watched the film and I was pleasantly surprised, as was my family. The dialogue, for the most part, was pretty decent. When it was funny, the amusement seemed to be intentional on the director’s part and the acting, although dodgy in places, wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. The CGI, although pretty bad at times, wasn’t as consistently godawful as I’d been led to believe either.
I liked the teenage kids (didn’t care so much for the youngest one. Not entirely sure what age she’s supposed to be but her main purpose within the narrative seemed to revolve around getting coddled with a cuddle), I liked the techie guys (their superior was less interesting and her acting wasn’t great but she got some good lines) and I liked the Action Parents. Yup, that’s what I’m going to call them. They had the perfect survival skill set to make it through that tsunami, earthquake and whatever the weird electrical storm thing was.
The film was ridiculous. That’s why I watched it. At one point the step-mum says to her freaked out step-daughter “it’s just a head wound”. I’m sure that’s reassuring to hear. The same character gets her leg crushed by a bit of fallen building pretty early on but, once she’s free, it barely seems to affect her. There’s also this bit where the earthquake starts and the dad and son, who are camping at the time, just end up sliding down the mountain in their tent. It was so stupid that I couldn’t stop laughing!
My only real criticism of the film is that the lesbian nextdoor neighbours died almost as soon as they’d been introduced. They had no time to develop personalities outside of the “helpful neighbours” persona and then they were the first people to get killed off out of those that we’d been introduced to. I suppose they were dead meat in movie terms: they seemed nice, loved each other and were evidently not straight. I’d have hoped that a film as trashy as this would have managed to avoid the standard “bury your gays” Hollywood trope, but apparently not. Also, the shaky cam got a little irritating after a while.
Overall, Geo-Disaster is a pretty fun film to watch if you’re in the mood for not thinking too hard. IMDb gives it 2.2/10 but I’d give it a solid 3.
randomsongwriter 