MegaFault (2009)

Actually, this was so awful it was exquisitely awful. So I'm splitting the difference and giving it a 5 out of 10. But don't get me wrong. This really was the Sarah Palin or Harry Reid of SciFi movies.

Starting with the snow-capped mountains of West Virginia, the movie then showed us what an earthquake was...something that you detonated by blowing things up...and it caused gaping chasms to open in the ground while something like artillery shells blew up in the air. The notion that a tectonic plate would just kind of split with no reference to any preexisting faults (like, say New Madrid) other than the San Andreas fault just astounded me, but this is science stuff and people who make science fiction movies shouldn't be held to that.

The geographic ignorance seemed to complement the geological ignorance nicely. Let's see, the nearest city west of Boone County, West Virginia was Lexington, Kentucky. And a plane going down on the outskirts of St. Louis ends a smoking pile of twisted metal outside of Stillwater, Oklahoma. I wonder if any of them had a map in their glove-box when they were filming it.

But I was also amazed that none of the cast apparently had any problems with these things either.

A real upside of this was that the viewer didn't really care what happened to the characters. In fact, at the end of the year, everyone involved in it should probably get nominated for some sort of Darwin Award. And there's something to be said for a movie that you can watch without any sense of loss if you should fall asleep.

And that's an amazing comment for a movie that blows up the Grand Canyon, among other things...