500 Films: #4 2012: Doomsday
My husband, Paul, and I, one day decided that we should collect disaster movies. And not just any disaster movie. We would collect "End of the World" [insert ominous BGM here] movies. So we made a list of the popular ones we've watched so far and bought their original DVDs. While we were in Astrovision, Paul saw these "other" titles, which, very obviously, went straight to DVD. I said, well, why not? It wouldn't be a collection if we were choosy, right? So we bought them.
Then last night, I said, "Baby, let's watch one."
Ho boy. Did I regret saying that.
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I should have known things would just go downhill when we popped the movie into the DVD player and were treated with trailers of movies like, "Alien VS. Hunter" (a movie that was like Aliens VS. Predator) and "Monster" (a weird mashup of Cloverfield and Godzilla).
Needless to say, Paul couldn't stop laughing his ass off.
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Right now, the plot is fuzzy. I am the first to admit that Hollywood has spoiled me. The entire movie from start to finish felt like a school production. (In fact, I think some school productions even look better.) There was too much light, there wasn't enough buildup, the special effects were horrendous--there was a point in the movie where the characters encountered hail while driving on a deserted road. There was hail. What there wasn't was damage from the hail on their PRISTINE WHITE VEHICLE.
I'm not even going to comment on the acting. Suffice to say, I didn't know anyone in the cast.
So okay... plot. Story. Well...
There's this girl and this guy who are within the vicinity of some volcano. They discover this cross artifact. Volcano goes boom. Girl and guy escape within an inch of their lives. (But not their foreign-language-speaking companion who gets squashed by a falling lava rock. I'll call him B-movie Casualty #1. For all intents and purposes, I think he was lucky.)
Then there's this other girl, a missionary, who's walking along this bridge in a tank top and shorts. There's this other guy who's taking pictures, sort of cam-stalking her until he goes down and talks to her. She's supposed to go to her "adopted village" because the people there were sick. They encounter a pregnant woman instead.
Then there's this other girl, a paramedic-slash-nonbeliever, who just goes on and on and on about how she doesn't believe in God and religion and blah blah blah.
Oh, and there's the father of the missionary girl, who is up in his nifty little office somewhere in Maryland, monitoring all the little disasters about to happen in the world in his tiny little computer. There's a tornado happening somewhere in the US, the West Coast is about to be flooded he says, and earthquakes affecting the other characters, but his office doesn't seem to be affected in the slightest.
All these "chosen" people (who aren't really chosen at all), eventually end up needing to go to this pyramid in Mexico. Volcano couple need to deliver the cross. Missionary girl & cam-stalker guy need to deliver pregnant woman. Father of missionary girl meets paramedic on deserted highway and apparently, he needs to deliver her so she can help deliver the pregnant woman's baby. (There's so much delivering going on in this paragraph!)
In the middle of all this, we have scenes from Armageddon (reports of meteor falling), Deep Impact (mother-daughter bonding), The Day After Tomorrow (temperature drops in Mexico where it suddenly snows... father tells daughter to stay inside and build a fire, but she goes to the pyramid in a tank top and shorts!) There's some that feels like The Mummy and Indiana Jones (the first couple are archaeologists, I think. It wasn't clear.) Oh, and Left Behind! When all the religious people vanish into thin air. Of course, 2012 is spread over everything, because it IS also 2012 (just not the movie that starred John Cusack.)
B-movie casualty #2 comes in the form of first couple's companion, that looked like the horizontally-challenged (See? I can be politically correct if I want.) guy that got eaten by a T-rex in Jurassic Park. However, this guy gets swallowed up by a large, overly-straight, but otherwise jagged-edged crack that opens up in the earth where they're walking.
B-movie casualty #3 was cam-stalker guy. Remember that part with the hail? And that I said the car is pristine? Well, it's pristine until ONE little hailstone crashes through the windshield creating a nice little round hole in it... and the guy's chest. He talks to missionary girl for a few minutes, I don't actually know how long, but apparently it was too long because I fast-forwarded that part and IT -STILL- TOOK A WHILE FOR HIM TO DIE! This considering the fact that he was hit in the center of his sternum and bleeding profusely.
B-movie casualty #4 was the girl of archaeologist couple #1. It serves them right for bringing up their relationship bull in the middle of the freakin' movie when we just want to get the fireworks done and over with!
B-movie casualties #5, 6 and 7 were the U.S. West Coast (flooded by tsunami), the city of London (razed by fire), and Jerusalem. God is really very OC about destruction. I've never seen a neater tearing down of Jerusalem's arches.
So anyway, the characters that do survive get to the pyramid, there's a slow-mo family reunion of the father and daughter (where I've already facepalmed myself to death screaming, "The pregnant girl's about to give birth! YOU HAVE NO TIME FOR THIS NOT TO MENTION A FREAKIN' SLOW-MO OF THIS!"), they get pregnant girl on the tablet in the center of this chamber, pregnant girl gives birth to the next "prophet of God" and some such, the disasters stop, there's a weird voiceover which I didn't even try listening to (I was just eager for this movie to be over), they pan-out from the pyramid. The End!
And I wonder why some movies go straight to DVD. Sheesh.
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