Terror Peak

The one thing setting this low budget disaster picture apart from myriads of others is its New Zealand setting ,which at least ensures we have some attractive scenery to look at when the main activity gets a little predictable .

Lynda Carter plays a vulcanologist who is in New Zealand with her second husband and daughter by a previous marriage .He is the owner of an adventure holiday company scouting the island for a possible new venture when a volcano long believed dormant erupts trapping the daughter and a young Kiwi guide below ground .Carter organises the overall rescue attempt while the husband -played by Parker Stevenson -tries to rescue the trapped couple .

Stirred into the brew are the owner of the local tourist lodge and his former partner ,a Maori -and these play a key role in the climax of the movie .There is also some rather half-baked mysticism in the form of a Maori prophetess and this does not really work too well

There is nothing new here -we even have the standard ploy of the authorities refusing to give creedence to warnings of impending catastrophe until it is almost too late ,and the bringing together of the family group in the face of danger

Budgetary restrictions are evident in the scenes of eruption and the acting is no more than adequate but it is a passable time waster

Terror Peak is a nice little volcano movie about a new family that travels to New Zealand to find and fund a possible new tourist attraction. The husband is the tourist agent and the wife is of course an ex vulcanologist with a tragic history with volcanos. The teenage daughter is a typical teenage daughter. The kids get lost inside the now active volcano and have to be rescued. Some OK special effects for a low budget film. Dialog was a little too touchy feely, but it worked pretty well. Some OK action and not to many continuity breaks. Good suspense. It is not true to the science of vulcanology, but it wasn't meant to be.

Former WONDER WOMAN actress Lynda Carter finds herself down on her luck in this makeshift disaster movie about a family caught in and around an erupting volcano. The only thing this film has going for it is that it's a Kiwi production, so the New Zealand scenery looks fantastic and there are various Maori supporting characters in the story for novelty value. Other than that it's business as usual.

Most annoyingly, TERROR PEAK plays it safe throughout and none of the peril sequences convince because you know everybody's going to make it. The usual gamut of poor special effects and worse acting make this an entirely familiar outing for the genre, and even Carter's worthwhile efforts in the acting department can't help it. What hurts it the most is that Carter's screen daughter is given the most obnoxious personality ever and has such a prominent role in the proceedings; big mistake. Plus there's an odd timbre to the audio which makes all the voices sound too-loud and theatrical.

Apart from ... Peter Elliott as Patrick. At first I thought it was a bad Scottish accent. Then I thought ... 'No!' It's a bad Northern Irish accent. And by the end of the film (I watched it, on and off, for two hours) I decided I preferred it 'Off'.

The New Zealand Scenery was beautiful. The Production values were bad, but probably not so bad, I'm sure the budget wasn't huge. No worse than Bay Watch, Xena, or other syndicated series. Former seventies sex symbols Carter and Stevenson headline as newlyweds.