Planetquake

When I decided to watch 'PlanetQuake' I was in the mood for a 'bad' B-movie. In that regard, the movie did not disappoint - which isn't really saying much.

When a nuclear bomb detonates on the seabed, it causes a series of earthquakes and tsunamis. Now, a group of very knowledgeable people - lead by Dr. Milly Anderson (Erica Duke) - must try to prevent an impending doomsday disaster.

Helping Milly is Peter Houston (Phillip Andre Botello), who knows his way around computers, and her brother Dresden (Doug Jeffery), who used to be in service of the National Security Agency. (Quite a handsome silver daddy, if I dare say!) Together, they devise a bold - and unbelievable - plan to save the planet.

From the acting to the dialogue and the visuals, 'PlanetQuake' is definitely a B-movie. The visuals are cheap, but hey, I could see they tried really hard. Not every disaster movie is awarded a big budget. The dialogue wasn't that great and at times I found they were spoon-feeding the audience with information instead of showing it.

If you don't set your expectations too high, I'm sure you'll have a good (enough) time with 'PlanetQuake' - even if it is just for a laugh...

When I sat down to watch the 2024 movie "Planetquake", I had never heard about it. And I figured that chances were high that this would be a movie from none other than The Asylum. And true enough, it is The Asylum that was behind this movie. And with that fact, I have to admit that I didn't really harbor much of any grand expectations to the movie. But I still opted to watch it, and give writer and director Monroe Robertson the benefit of the doubt.

Truth be told, then every now and again The Asylum do spew out movies that actually are worthwhile watching.

The storyline from writer and director Monroe Robertson is pretty straightforward, playing on every single generic trope of the natural disaster genre. So, while he was playing it safe, you know what you are in for here, for better or worse. It did, however, make for a somewhat generic viewing experience, as there wasn't anything thrilling or new brought to the genre of natural disaster movies.

The acting performances in "Planetquake" were actually fair, taking into consideration the premise of the script and storyline. There were a couple of familiar faces on the cast list, with the likes of Michael Paré, Erica Duke and Phillip Andre Botello. Yep, I've seen enough dubious low budget movies to be familiar with Erica Duke and Phillip Andre Botello.

20 minutes into the movie, Dr. Milly Anderson (played by Erica Duke) said, and I kid you not, "How can we slow the tectonic plates?" The premise of that sentence is just so ludicrous. And that is pretty much the epitome of the writing skills here.

The effects in "Planetquake" are all over the place. Some of the effects are downright of questionable and laughable, and you don't really buy into the disastrous events that takes place, because the effects are so wooden and rigid. But other effects actually look good and somewhat realistic enough, which makes this movie somewhat of a jumble of emotions because of the effects. And I love how localized some of the earthquakes are, totally annihilating one building but not a scratch on the adjacent buildings.

The intentions to make a grand scale disaster movie was definitely there, I will give writer and director Monroe Robertson that much. Just how well it was accomplished on the screen, well that is a whole other story.

Ultimately, then "Planetquake" turned out as I expected it to, for better or worse. I will just chalk it up as yet another run-of-the-mill movie from The Asylum watched and notched off of the list.

My rating of "Planetquake" lands on a generous four out of ten stars, as it is not the worst of dumpster fires to be spewed out by The Asylum.

Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for this movie. At the start, it stated 25 years of movies by the Asylum. At the beginning, it was really low quality, poor special effects, and laughable scripts. Since then, some amazingly almost decent movies have come for Asylum. However, this movie harkens back to its roots. It is the sloppiness of the movie that really detracts. There is a passenger plane, shown in the air, and then on the ground, after the crash. Apparently the landing took off all the paint, and made it look like an abandoned fuselage. And rescue crews apparently working on the natural disaster in Seattle were from Germany, based on the words on the back of the uniform. Feuerwehr, meaning fire department. One has a woman who is in charge of earthquake monitoring, and her husband is in the military, and her brother is no where to be found, after leaving a top secret government project, but he holds the key to solving the life ending disaster that happened when a mission went wrong. Oh, and her daughter was on the plane that crashed. Fortunately I was able to stream this movie, so I could take frequent breaks to get away from the nonsense. I am giving it three stars as the fault lies with the budget and the script, not the performances.

Acting was mostly fine, writing was weak, primarily in the area of "science", which was atrocious.

The characters were believable, for the most part. Having a girl (Sophie) in charge of helping on the airplane was a joke.

The lasers in space, from a far away orbit, was so unrealistic as to make one cry. The airplane crash-landing was catastrophic, and few (if anyone) would have survived. Moving tectonic plates -- gimme a break. Earthquake simulations were simplistic. Buildings fell like CGI from the 1980s. Big ocean waves hitting the coast -- ridiculous.

Some of it wasn't horrible, but don't waste your time.

At the time of this review this movie had a 6.9 rating. I took my chances and ordered it for $6.99 on our pay per view platform to enjoy with my teenage son for movie night. One good thing that came out of this movie was the bonding that my son and I had while laughing at how bad this movie was. It really is a shame because it could've been great with better execution. The storyline felt rushed, lacked character development, very unrealistic scenarios, and casting and acting were at times so bad it was embarrassing. I have spent $7 on worse movies and at least the plot itself was enjoyable. I definitely would recommend waiting until this is out in a streaming platform vs paying to see this movie individually.