10.0 Earthquake

I love disaster flicks often I work from home and just put them on my streaming playlist to fill the silent void as I work. I have discovered a few hidden gems using this practice, however this is not a gem, dude its a dud. David Chokachi is a decent actor wasted in this below average snooze fest. I've become accustomed to the works of the Asylum,UFO Films ,and Cinetel,enter now Marisa Films, what are these Tax Shelters? Remember back in the day low budget movies that actually tried to live up to the big guys, not anymore cheap special FX no attempt to make a quality production just sell it to one of the hundreds of worldwide TV channels and break even. Your not missing anything by not swing this movie.

More disaster trash from the SyFy Channel, made with even less originality than before. 10.0 EARTHQUAKE is your bog-standard earthquake movie in which America finds itself assailed by a series of continuous earthquakes, the sole result of which seems to be creating CGI cracks in the ground and causing bad actors to run around and scream a lot.

This routinely dull film follows exactly the same template as many a SyFy movie, including an inordinate amount of time spent on characters driving around in cars. Quite why you're supposed to care about a car full of bratty teenagers, even if they are the offspring of the main characters, I don't know. The film lumbers from one clumsy set piece to the next while the script regurgitates old pseudo-science and the viewer struggles to stay awake. Disgraced actor Jeffrey Jones is the only familiar face they got to appear in this film, which says something.

Its one of these Syfy channel productions with a cheesy comedy disaster scenario and equally cheesy special effects.

There are a series of small earthquakes tearing apart Los Angeles. Two scientists believe that it is all building to a super-quake that will drop the entire city into a lava filled basin. They show this by hitting a hammer on a car windscreen and still having to rely on bad CGI effects for this demonstration to work.

An Engineer whose company is responsible for the quakes due to their fracking activities helps the scientists with a bizarre plan to somehow divert the epic enter to a less populated area of LA and save millions of lives.

The film starts of slowly enough as the fissures lead to people disappearing in various scenarios although we get an eyeful of some lovely ladies in bikinis. There is some nice location shots of various parts of LA as the film tries to set the scene.

However we just wait and wait for the 10.0 Earthquake and get teased with some fault lines here, the Capitol Building being wrecked there but its really a poorly written film with cheap effects and a crummy plot.

When the 'teen' daughter that dad is angsting over (a camping trip! no adults! boys!!!!) is played by a 27 year old who reads closer to thirty-something, you know it's not gonna be good.

And it's just...really not.

Good background noise for when you need something to lull you to sleep.

Why and how do these kind of films ever get made? This one was not in the least suspenseful or exciting. It was ridiculously predictable and I knew in the first 10 minutes who would live, who would die, who was getting a divorce, would come together and after disaster hits, find their daughter walking down the road in the middle of the night in the Angeles National Forest and they would live happily ever after. Seriously Hollywood, disasters do NOT always have a happy ending, how about a disaster movie that is even somewhat close to reality? I miss the Irwin Allen disaster movies where you got to know and care about the characters and were shocked or delighted when they lived or died. There was no one to care about in this film and the only "10" about the film was simply the title.