For as illogical and incompetent the other Nature Unleashed films have been, Volcano is somewhat tolerable. The key problem is that it misses one key aspect: a volcano. You'll need to make it through the entire movie just to see why you're watching this.
The bulk is made up of a man attempting to decipher why a strange girl is following him mere weeks after his wife's death. It's dull, meandering, and hardly gripping. It does manage to be somewhat creepy, even if the end result is far too obvious.
The mystery may have worked somewhere else, just not here. When the movie is titled Volcano, that's what people want. All of the clues make no sense to the final solution, and how the leads decipher it doesn't add up either. There's no logic at work, and there are a hundred other ways to figure out if a volcano problem is approaching for a screenwriter. This path is not on that list.
When the payoff finally comes around, there are some minor moments of destruction and the obligatory "school kids trapped" rescue. It's done on an obviously tight budget, but it does manage to pull off some nice shots of running people (some on fire) and stunt men take some obvious staged falls. Lava is either CG or stock footage, mostly the latter.
There of course should be far more of this, and that's the critical flaw that doesn't make this worth sitting through. Compared to the other "films" in the series, Volcano is a work of art. That still doesn't mean it rises above the cable TV movie level, and on the Sci-Fi scale, it's not much higher.
Article comments
1 - J
"When the movie is titled Volcano, that's what people want"
I spent 10 minutes convinced the movie was not the movie the TV guide said it was...I ended up here trying to find what I was watching and where my disaster flick was!..I was expecting a disaster movie not a creepy thriller...what a waste of an hour...