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Slow-Moving Lava Has Never Been Scarier in This Bonkers 1997 Volcano Disaster Flick Starring Tommy Lee Jones
Haven’t you always wanted to see what L.A. looks like covered in lava?
Twisters touches down on Peacock on November 15 (watch it here!), and the streaming arrival of this year’s blockbuster tornado epic has us remembering just how cool sci-fi disaster flicks can be in general.
Already streaming on Peacock is 1997’s big-budget Volcano (see it here), a movie, like Twisters, that puts its featured natural menace right there in the name. It’s a sure play, right? From Sharknado to Lavalantula and seismic dangers far beyond, it’s a time-honored tradition to title your disaster movie after the big, bad thing that makes people run for the hills.
Volcano: Tommy Lee Jones stays unbeaten vs. Mother Nature
It’s an easy and obvious cue, in a movie called Volcano, to keep your eyes peeled for the first appearance of that big, bad, angry mountain. But in hindsight, maybe they should’ve just called it Cracked or Fissure or something. When you name your mega-meltdown movie Volcano, after all, it had darn well better have an actual volcano in it — and what we get instead is a lot of great actors running all over Los Angeles looking mostly down at the ground.
Nope, there’s no visible cinder cone looming for most of this movie, even though Volcano reportedly was inspired by the real-world appearance — right up out of the dirt — of the 1943 Mexican volcano Parícutin (which, we’ve gotta point out, looks exactly like a volcano). The movie’s main danger turns out to be tons of slow-moving lava — a threat that’s for sure scary when it’s oozing down the middle of Wilshire Boulevard, but borderline cheesy when it’s powering the freaked-out antics of Tommy Lee Jones (as the movie’s chief emergency management boss) and the rest of the admittedly awesome Volcano cast.
Alongside Jones playing his typically affable gruff self, the late Anne Heche stars as a local university geologist, with strong support from a (seemingly ageless) Don Cheadle as the emergency management guy who holds things down back at the office. Gaby Hoffmann, then in her teens, stars as the daughter-in-danger to Jones’ character, alongside a woefully underused Keith David as an L.A. police lieutenant who helps improvise the movie’s successful (but totally anticlimactic) “throw water on it!” defense to prevent the city from fully succumbing to hot molten madness.
Director Mick Jackson (L.A. Story, The Bodyguard) knows just how to make Volcano’s 1990s version of Los Angeles feel lived-in and real, populating the movie with Angelenos from all walks of life. Cops, yuppies, homeless people, domestic slackers, ambulance-chasing reporters, working stiffs, and future-millennial kids — they’re convincingly represented and endangered in this flick, all chattering and cross-talking over each other in a rapid-fire way that endearingly evokes the ensemble banter of a Robert Altman film. Getting to know the people and the city (Volcano was mostly shot on location in and around Los Angeles) carries you about half an hour into the movie, before those spooky fissures finally let loose and usher in a solid hour of pure pyroclastic chaos.
Without an actual mountain for everyone to point at and then run away from, the threat from the lava ends up serving as kind of a letdown, no matter how awesomely terrible it might be to watch a dude get slowly engulfed in the stuff. So, as if to compensate, Volcano amplifies its molasses-slow magma menace with random lava bombs that fall (with hilarious sound effects) like meteors out of the sky, raining ash that eventually makes Jones and Heche look more like they’ve been rolling around in trash than trudging bravely through a natural disaster.
It’s all just the right amount of cheesy and the right amount of fun, though the movie’s lengthy midsection keeps the chaos so relentlessly dialed near its breaking point that it’s easy to lose track of the bigger picture. In the closing moments as the camera pans over the bent-but-not-broken L.A. landscape, we’re finally treated to a sight of the tell-tale makings of a baby cinder cone jutting up right through the heart of the city. For all we know, it’s sitting there still in this flick’s one-off movie lore, just waiting for a sequel to come along so it can swell, at last, into a proper movie mountain.
Stream Volcano on Peacock here.
