*WARNING: SPOILERS*
This is one of the best acted, most intense and oh so real action movies I've ever watched. How this didn't get a theatrical release is absolutely beyond me. Or an Oscar. Marnie Alton should certainly have won an Oscar for her fantastic performance in this masterpiece of a movie, and Yossi Wein should have won an Oscar long ago for U.S Seals! I mean when that villain blew up the overpass, I could really see the fear in the eyes of that poor truck driver and it made me feel like I was there and feeling this too. All the effects were some of the best I've ever witnessed, it should have also won an Oscar for "Best Special Effects". I just can't get over how this masterpiece of cinema has gone almost unnoticed for the last 3 years. I have to make a change to that. I am going into town and handing out free copies and urging everybody to rate and review it. I know they'll enjoy it and maybe a cult following will eventually get it a theatrical release. It's such a fantastic movie I just can't over it. I am watching it just now for the 33rd time and haven't missed one minute. I've cancelled many of my plans just so I can watch this masterpiece and I feel no regret. This has brought me more joy than anything else on the planet probably could.
Erm, maybe not...
This movie was terrible, and for that reason, was hilarious.
It's funny to think that once upon a time NuImage used to do movies like Hard Justice, The Peacekeeper, Top Of The World, Scarred City and many more. By no means were these movies masterpieces, but they were solid, well made and above all highly enjoyable action movies with excellent production values and solid action scenes. Hard Justice being one of the best direct to video action movies I've ever seen. But where did it all go wrong? Did they lose money over spending considerable budgets on movies that went direct to video? In recent years they have put out such dreck as U.S Seals, Derailed, Death Train, dreadful Operation Delta Force movie after another and much more. Why are they even employing this Yossi Wein anyway? Currently on IMDb, only one of his movies have a rating over 3 and what's even worse is that the production budgets in his movies certainly aren't as low as other awful B-movie directors like Albert Pyun, Jim Wynorski, Fred Olen Ray etc. so he has no excuse to botch them in the way he does.
"Sudden Damage" as it's called in the UK is quite possibly the most pointless movie of all time. I won't even get started on the script, it is ridiculous and makes no sense what so ever. Much of it takes place in a casino in Las Vegas and the climax takes place at the Hoover Dam. If you've seen the earlier, and enjoyable NuImage movie that was Top Of The World then that will probably sound overly familiar. That's because this uses footage from Top Of The World and is basically the same movie with:
- Worse actors who are taking the thing far too seriously. Witness one of the most boring, and most wooden and unscary villains in history.
- A bunch of grainy news footage of a firefight from the 1980's by the looks of things. Not just by the quality of this can you tell this is dated footage, but the vehicles, the clothes, the hairstyles etc. are enough for us to tell this is from a different era. There is no way director Yossi Wein couldn't have seen this, but I'm only assuming he didn't really care or was deliberately trying to make a bad movie.
- Some of the cheesiest modelwork I've ever seen. Witness an inch tall plastic toy truck exploding which doesn't even match the type of vehicle used in the footage prior to it. Honestly, this is the worst modelwork I've ever seen. If you've seen the toy train in Derailed and thought that looked bad, just wait till you see this. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
- Car chase footage from Top Of The World which makes absolutely no sense being in this movie.
- Locations faked with actors standing over a static background, ,which looks like something out of the 1950's where the lighting of the sun doesn't match at all.
- Dreadful, out of sync voice dubbing.
- A cruise ship exploding with absolutely laughable CGI flames.
What's even sadder about this mess is that it actually looks like Yossi Wein has been handed a budget that something decent could have been made from. The interior set of the casino is passable and there's tons of explosions and some decent stunts. However, it looks like he's decided to blow it all on a random explosion inside the building every 2 minutes. I've never seen less competent directing than this, NEVER.
Overall, this is Grade Z material and the sheer quality or rather the lack of it will absolutely blow you away and it gets worse at an unbelievable rate. If you want a movie to make fun of then only Extreme Limits is a better choice than this.
Oh, and the title "Disaster" is because the villain, after falling several hundred feet down the Hoover Dam courtesy of footage from Top Of The World, has enough energy left to press a button which blows up the whole dam and causes a "Disaster". This only happens in the last 4 minutes and is so badly implemented it may as well not have been included at all.