Disaster(rous) Movies

I have been watching some really bad disaster and horror movies lately: ones that are so bad that they're actually fun to watch. Many of them are made in Canada (because of tax breaks), and so Vancouver or Montreal usually doubles as the latest U.S. metropolis facing extinction from a natural or man-made disaster. Sometimes it's even funnier when they forget to edit out Canadian flags or mailboxes.

I've been trying to decide whether it's the dialogue, bad acting, or campy special effects that I enjoy most in these low budget, good bad movies, and I've decided it's one or a combination of all three. In one disaster movie I recently watched, a family is fleeing from a man-made catastrophe that could be classified under "misuse of science". The father is driving, the mother is a passenger in the front, and the teenaged son is in the back seat playing a Gameboy. The kid exclaims something to the effect of "Mom, mom, everyone's getting vaporized". The mother responds: "Play your game, dear".

Of course the stereotypes in the bad disaster/horror movies are also fun: the most obnoxious or incidental character will get killed first. Sullen teenagers will survive and bond with their parents. The pretty lead actress will no doubt survive the gorefest, but her not-as-pretty-and-perky girlfriend will expire. The handsome lead man will also usually survive, unless he is too cocky, in which case he may suffer the same fate as the other expendables in the movie. Women appear to fall down a lot in these movies, just as the bad thing/weather/vapourizer approaches, causing the hero to swoop in like John Wayne ("never mind, little missy") and save the day. And if it's a man-made disaster, there is the good "scientist" trying to get the attention of the POTUS, army, air force, or his ex-wife, while the evil scientist is like Scrooge McDuck, seeing only $$$ in the invention that has gone astray and is destroying the earth, but could nonetheless be profitable if anyone's left to buy it.

And just when I thought they had run out of meteorites, asteroids, space ships, and other stuff falling on the earth, my faith in endless bad movies was renewed. In the most recent one I watched, it was falling plasma destroying the earth, the acting and special effects were terrible, and the hero was a chubby and ordinary-looking video store owner who still managed to save the world!

More popcorn, anyone?