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Sometimes I like to see a really bad movie or TV show. There's nothing like knowing someone else spent good money on producing complete dreck to make me feel, gee, I could write/act/direct, better than that.
Disaster films tend to be fine stinkers. Not just bad , but worse than reality-show awful. Such was the case with NBC's current mini-series 10.5. It's a peach of a bad TV show. Yes, on a scale of stinkers from 1 to 10, it's a ten point five.
The show opened with a bicyclist riding through Seattle during an earthquake. How do we know it was Seattle? Fraiser was in a coffee house nearby? Well not quite. No we see the Space Needle! Of course, the Space Needle I remember is close to the water and this one is well inland. But, no matter. The structure is supposed to fall on the bicyclist. How do you accomplish that? Well naturally, in an earthquake you ride your bike under the tallest over hanging structure you can find, right? When the Space Needle starts falling the bicyclist takes off so that he has the longest ride possible to get out from under. No sneaky right or left turns to just avoid it all together, no siree. He wants the thrill to the bitter end.
Interspersed with this we see the heroine of the piece, trapped in her house. We know she's the heroine immediately cause she's so purty, and later she answers the phone as Dr. So-and-so, as if her co-workers don't know she has a degree. Oh yes, her coworkers. They work at the Washington State seismic lab which seems to be the most remarkably overstaffed scientific institution in the whole Northwest. They have some amazing equipment, but the primary duty of these scientists seems to be to shout at each other. We can tell immediately that the heroine is the best scientist, and will have the answer to everything in the end. Why? Because while her buddies ride out the quake at their desks, shouting the numbers at each other all of them can plainly see at their own work stations, she runs to a relatively safe place.
We cut to Jon Schneider. Is Super Boy going to make an appearance? Well, no but we do have classic Obnoxius Teenage Daughter (TM) to take his place. We recognize her by eye rolling and her turning on the music really loud.
Then (or does it matter when?) we cut to a couple of old guys playing basketball. These guys are so out of shape they look like they're trying to commit suicide by heart-attack. Of course this is not the case. So we immediately assume it's the President of the US and his most trusted aide. Now the basketball game ends when the aide makes a three point shot. The action stops dead while President Bo Bridges hammers into the audience's brain the phrase "You always take the long shot." Now we're wishing it was a show about betting on horse racing. But, no, it's a disaster movie, so we know that despite all the destruction, this geezer is going to team up with the beautiful heroine and save everybody from the really big one. Frankly by this time we wish they wouldn't.
Back to earthquakes we see a remarkable bit of footage of a crack in the earth chasing a train down the track. It must have been a marvel of 19th century engineering to put the track so squarely on the fault line that the earth would split open right down the middle between the rails for miles! And the graphics were so realistic. It looked exactly like a model train down to the smallest detail. You could almost see it in the box on a hobby shop shelf. The neat part was that once the earthquake devoured the train, it was full, and stopped dead. It was so demonic they needed Buffy not a seismologist..
Then we switch back to divorcee Jon Schneider, who is going camping with his daughter who naturally resents him not being around. So she makes an ass of herself to encourage him to keep coming to visit... But wait, the road is blocked. They'll never get to that remote campsite they're supposed to be cut off in later. What will they do?? Good heavens, Jon isn't Mr. Kent this time. He's BO DUKE! Immediately he drives off through the forrest smashing down tress, etc. to get to the primitive road not far away. Oh, if only there'd been a creek to jump with a convient ramp. Ah love it, ah love it.
This eco-crime having been commited to the great satisfaction of all, we switch back to the President and his aide. Now the President usually doesn't sound like a political hack in these disaster flicks, but he sure does in this one. The President is going to be the obligatory political moron in this one! What realism! We switch to the aide who has been appointed head of whatever is supposed to be investgating all this earthquake business. The guy normally works for the agency that helps disaster victims, FEMA, but is he rushing to Seattle to survey the damage? Heck no! He's rushing to LA to get in the path of THE BIG ONE, and he's bring all the seismic folks from Washington State to help him. He tells them they are going to have the best equipment possible. What was all that stuff back in Washington that he called them away from? Inferior stuff, no doubt. I guess the government has been secretly buying seismic equipment out of the CIA budget and stockpiling it in LA.
This only took up 40 minutes of a 2 hour episode. But, I'd had enough laughs. A computer game was calling my name. I turned off the TV and was in a good mood the whole evening.
Disaster films tend to be fine stinkers. Not just bad , but worse than reality-show awful. Such was the case with NBC's current mini-series 10.5. It's a peach of a bad TV show. Yes, on a scale of stinkers from 1 to 10, it's a ten point five.
The show opened with a bicyclist riding through Seattle during an earthquake. How do we know it was Seattle? Fraiser was in a coffee house nearby? Well not quite. No we see the Space Needle! Of course, the Space Needle I remember is close to the water and this one is well inland. But, no matter. The structure is supposed to fall on the bicyclist. How do you accomplish that? Well naturally, in an earthquake you ride your bike under the tallest over hanging structure you can find, right? When the Space Needle starts falling the bicyclist takes off so that he has the longest ride possible to get out from under. No sneaky right or left turns to just avoid it all together, no siree. He wants the thrill to the bitter end.
Interspersed with this we see the heroine of the piece, trapped in her house. We know she's the heroine immediately cause she's so purty, and later she answers the phone as Dr. So-and-so, as if her co-workers don't know she has a degree. Oh yes, her coworkers. They work at the Washington State seismic lab which seems to be the most remarkably overstaffed scientific institution in the whole Northwest. They have some amazing equipment, but the primary duty of these scientists seems to be to shout at each other. We can tell immediately that the heroine is the best scientist, and will have the answer to everything in the end. Why? Because while her buddies ride out the quake at their desks, shouting the numbers at each other all of them can plainly see at their own work stations, she runs to a relatively safe place.
We cut to Jon Schneider. Is Super Boy going to make an appearance? Well, no but we do have classic Obnoxius Teenage Daughter (TM) to take his place. We recognize her by eye rolling and her turning on the music really loud.
Then (or does it matter when?) we cut to a couple of old guys playing basketball. These guys are so out of shape they look like they're trying to commit suicide by heart-attack. Of course this is not the case. So we immediately assume it's the President of the US and his most trusted aide. Now the basketball game ends when the aide makes a three point shot. The action stops dead while President Bo Bridges hammers into the audience's brain the phrase "You always take the long shot." Now we're wishing it was a show about betting on horse racing. But, no, it's a disaster movie, so we know that despite all the destruction, this geezer is going to team up with the beautiful heroine and save everybody from the really big one. Frankly by this time we wish they wouldn't.
Back to earthquakes we see a remarkable bit of footage of a crack in the earth chasing a train down the track. It must have been a marvel of 19th century engineering to put the track so squarely on the fault line that the earth would split open right down the middle between the rails for miles! And the graphics were so realistic. It looked exactly like a model train down to the smallest detail. You could almost see it in the box on a hobby shop shelf. The neat part was that once the earthquake devoured the train, it was full, and stopped dead. It was so demonic they needed Buffy not a seismologist..
Then we switch back to divorcee Jon Schneider, who is going camping with his daughter who naturally resents him not being around. So she makes an ass of herself to encourage him to keep coming to visit... But wait, the road is blocked. They'll never get to that remote campsite they're supposed to be cut off in later. What will they do?? Good heavens, Jon isn't Mr. Kent this time. He's BO DUKE! Immediately he drives off through the forrest smashing down tress, etc. to get to the primitive road not far away. Oh, if only there'd been a creek to jump with a convient ramp. Ah love it, ah love it.
This eco-crime having been commited to the great satisfaction of all, we switch back to the President and his aide. Now the President usually doesn't sound like a political hack in these disaster flicks, but he sure does in this one. The President is going to be the obligatory political moron in this one! What realism! We switch to the aide who has been appointed head of whatever is supposed to be investgating all this earthquake business. The guy normally works for the agency that helps disaster victims, FEMA, but is he rushing to Seattle to survey the damage? Heck no! He's rushing to LA to get in the path of THE BIG ONE, and he's bring all the seismic folks from Washington State to help him. He tells them they are going to have the best equipment possible. What was all that stuff back in Washington that he called them away from? Inferior stuff, no doubt. I guess the government has been secretly buying seismic equipment out of the CIA budget and stockpiling it in LA.
This only took up 40 minutes of a 2 hour episode. But, I'd had enough laughs. A computer game was calling my name. I turned off the TV and was in a good mood the whole evening.