L'epicentro

A run-of-the-mill spy/action movie which entertains until the earthquake stops everything for several minutes just for the sake of special effects. If they HAD to have an earthquake in the movie, they could at least have tried to relate it to the plot! It's as though the story was already written and then someone decided they wanted an earthquake movie, picked the script off the shelf and then pasted an earthquake in over the top. A totally confusing mismatch, but take the earthquake out and you have an OK movie.

The building special effects were quite good, but others were rather poor - in fact they showed the same footage of a pipe being forced apart at least three times, once mirrored to make it look like a different one!

I was really looking forward to watching this movie for a while but then I found it was airing on UPN network and that kind of disappointed me. It was a decent action movie but it lacked the martial art fight scenes that I was hoping on since Gary Daniels was starring in it. Gary's role was kind of like a villian role until the end of the movie I didn't really like that. If I were to rate I would rate **out of****.

"Epicenter" has a neat premise but spotty execution, and is ultimately undone by lousy casting. But it's nowhere near as bad as the dogpile of negative commentators here would have you believe.

Gary Daniels is a techie who tried to sell spyplane plans to a foreign government, but is caught in the act by an FBI agent and stressed single mom laughingly played by Traci Lords.

Suddenly, the Greatest Earthquake Ever Known doesn't send them to the Land of the Lost, but just makes it a little bit more difficult for Traci to deliver Daniels to the proper authorities, while the bad guys try to execute them both.

You know what? This movie was a hoot. It was a low-budget, Traci-Lords-starring, direct-to-video, not-enough-Jeff-Fahey hoot, and all you h8ters can just hush the heck up.

So what if this movie repurposes a scene from "Metro"? Have you seen "Metro"? I wouldn't wipe the schmutz under my nads with the rest of that movie. I'm glad someone put its one decent action scene to a better use.

And to all those folks crying, "Hey, that's the same elevator from 'Speed'!" Find a girl, kiss her, and stop spending your time pointing out similar elevators in movies.

Dollar Tree had this for, yep, a dollar. Not sure I'd spend much more, but glad I laid out the buck for this one.

To keep it simple the movie was put together partially with help from other movies. I'm thinking "Metro" with Eddie Murphy (the scene with the cable car (MUNI?)). They didn't even bother to change the driver. Same guy, same bullet wounds. Next I'm thinking Money Train. The scene were a subway train rolls around knocking down some stilts or something was cut and pasted directly from "Money Train" with Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson. Also, scenes were copied (not cut and pasted, I think) from Speed with Keanu Reeves: the elevator scene, were a person gets rescued out of the elevator in the nick of time before it crashes several floors down.

Wasn't there some scenes pasted from Volcano with Tommy Lee Jones?

Nevertheless, Traci is the most amazing FBI-agent, I've ever seen. Bigger and stronger guys couldn't even go half the way she went. And I especially like the scene where she and Gary Daniels floats down some drain I think it is? Her hair is neatly combed backwards even though they're dropping like hammers down the drain.

A bit superficial and amateur-like, Traci. Don't settle for this. Go I've seen your in your earlier carrier. Well, I'm a guy, aren't I? But you can do more and better?

(Wonder if anyone ever reads this, let alone Traci. But anyway... :)

Australian thriller that seems to have been made for TV. Our star, the make-up-drowning, wig-wearing, daughter-neglecting Amanda Foster (B-movie queen Traci Lords) sets out to stop a spy who was actually working for that dude on the strip club who looked like Adam Alsing, who is actually working for the bald Russian fellow, uh, add to that an earthquake that destroys most of Los Angeles and you have yourself this cringe-worthy turkey. How did this get released into theaters?

Aside from a few sex scenes there is nothing entertaining about this flick. The mother-daughter relationship is clichéd and screams "look! character development!" to the point of being silly. The characters are all flat and stereotyped, and the special effects blow. Terminator 2 had better effects than this, and it was made nine years earlier. Skyscrapers that lean onto each other?? Give me a break!

Worth a couple of laughs, especially during the random old-man-with-a-toy-parrot-in-an-elevator scene (wtf?), and whenever that horrible kid actor tries to show pain. The ending is too lame for words and should leave any serious filmmaker flabbergasted (God, I love that adjective).

Worth your time if you like bad movies.

PS. It is my policy to have a bad pun in every review, so here you go: This movie left me shaking with anger. AHHAHHHAHAHAHAHAH!! Sorry.(r#12)