User reviews

This film was nowhere near as bad a movie as I was expecting after reading several reviews. Yes it did contain sequences from some other movies, however, I still enjoyed watching it. I thought that Traci Lords playing the main part of Agent Amanda Foster was decent and that her partnership with Gary Daniels worked quite well. In parts, I found it to be quite exciting and thought it moved along at a decent pace. Because this was a low budget movie, the special effects where not that great,however,I have seen much worse. If you do not take this film too seriously,then I think that you should(perhaps surprisingly) be entertained.

"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.

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!

This film easily qualifies as one of the worst I've ever seen. Is it a spy movie or a disaster movie? It's neither. Well, the movie IS a disaster, but in a different way. Lousy effects, lousy story, lots of continuity errors, terrible dialogs. As for the acting.... well, perhaps Traci Lords should have stuck to her old trade. Then again, she's one of the best actors in this movie, so there you go. So, why did I keep watching until the end? Well, this one is so bad that it's actually fun to keep watching! So, in fact, to be honest, if you want to have a good time, invite some friends, have a couple of stiff drinks and then watch this movie. You'll be on the floor laughing.

You can tell this movie is truly low-budget... I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the chase scene after the first 20 or so minutes into the movie, where two guys are chasing a cable car with their convertible... That whole 5-minute sequence was taken from the movie Metro, featuring Eddie Murphy and Michael Rapaport! You can see during a few clips the persons sitting in the convertible are clearly Murphy/Rapaport, even without freezing the frame.

I started watching this movie with a fairly open-mind, but taking scenes from another movie and then very poorly incorporating them to the plot is just wrong. Even with a low budget.

If you can't afford to make a scene such as this one, don't take a whole sequence from another film, think of something else! Watching this movie might have been a good way to kill off a couple of hours on a late night, but that scene was just too cheesy to even remotely try and take the rest of it seriously.

I just couldn't stop shaking my head when I watched this movie on TV this evening.

A guy steals military secrets to sell to the Russians. At the same time a FBI agent is working undercover to reveal what's going on!! Of course everything is messed up and the agent is transporting our guy into custody, as an earthquake shakes L.A.!!

Of course all of this happens after we've seen the exact same car chase from the movie Metro with Eddie Murphy, who stops a runaway trolley with his car blocking the trolley slowing it down. And of course during this earthquake we also had to see the subway-cart rolling over and over just as we saw in Speed!! The earthquake where we also saw the same rock four times from different angles smashing through the windscreen of a car!! And saw the same man falling on the pavement four times from different angles, seeing his briefcase oppening with papers flying around!!

Don't rent this movie, avoid it... It has all been seen before and totally fails a reuse of scenes in this movie!!

And here is another one from the guy's of PM entertainment. The people who brought you films like Hologram Man and launched the career of one Evan Lurie. I've seen a lot of movies from these guy's and yes there all nobrainers, lot's of explosions, a lot of rip -offs and second and third rate faces and acting, but fun strange enough. There all made for a shoestring budget and the plot is nowhere to be found but they look good and are quite well crafted. And so we have epicentre with a Traci - no I am not a minor - Lords and Gary Daniels, another PM star. The plot is about some stolen chip, a handy use of a webcam and an earthquake and a lot of it is shot in some ex Iron Curtain Country, try to piece the plot together from other movies in the dull parts.

Traci Lords is an undercover agent in a terrible wig who must deliver a guy who she thwarts selling weapons to the Russians. But what should happen? There's an earthquake!!! Traci must save her daughter but also keep hold of her prisoner. It's pretty awful but it's harmless. I think it debuted on UPN as movie of the week. In the UK it was shown as late night filler on movie channels.

Is it just me, or were some other people experiencing a touch of deja vu during some scenes of this movie.... From what i saw there were atleast 3 scenes used from other movies, the falling elevator (speed), the train flipping in the tunnel (money train) and the street car/car chase scene (metro), and these were not recreated scenes, they were the actual scenes from those 3 movies. Those scenes alone could have saved this movie, if it wasn't for dodgy looking sets,bad acting, a ridiculous plot and horrible dialogue. Gary Daniels martial arts talent is also wasted. The flooding scene in that bar was pretty easy on the eyes but apart from that this movie has no redeeming qualities. Don't get me wrong i don't hate this movie, any movie this bad is good for a laugh and if you can walk away with anything after this movie its a good laugh and the fact that you've practically just watched 4 movies in 1.

I happened to like this film. I originally watched it because Jeff Fahey was in it but found myself swept up in the storyline. For a moderately budgeted movie it was not that bad! The acting was great, the storyline was good, the special effects were not too horribly bad (pretty darn good for a movie with its budget actually). If you can get this on DVD or VHS by all means do so. Especially if you are a Jeff Fahey fan, you shouldn't miss it. The man is great in everything he does and this is just another example of his acting talents. Granted, there isn't a lot of him in this movie but the parts he is in are fantastic.

I was surprised how much I'd enjoy this film. An action extravanganza, surpassing a quota of what you expect, mainly due to the killer LA quake, the biggest ever. Impactful scenes, of shaking and collapsing buildings reduced to rubble. We have a cool story too, where from the onset, I was intrigued by all of Daniels businesss, his provocation. Here's a surplus of action, explosions, cool thrilling stunts, and good performances, where I really liked Lords. And Daniels likeable and well played character, did me solid, Going by other people's low opinions, it doesn't help, seeing this quite good B grade action pic, was headlined by Pepin, and Mehri, but this one joins their somewhat higher, decent standard minority of films, and boy, what a Monday night, you''re in for. It's good to see Fahey as an untrusting bad guy agent, doing us again, solid, where he's appearance, always has me thinking back to his break out Psycho 3 scumbag role. Very well made, B grade, you can't miss. The little daughter's over acting, did get on my nerves a bit, and Daniel's very generous, unexpected contribution, put a cherry on the happy ending.

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)

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... :)

From the beginning, I was intrigued by mystery and the hi-tech security measures, but then came the car chase, and I decided Epicenter was aimed at the 10 to 12-year-old crowd.... cars flying through the air and a train crash that sent it rolling sideways, over and over. But fairly soon it turned into an x-rater with fully nude dancers in a night club, followed by a very explicit sex scene. The acting was mostly good, but the script made both the good guys and bad guys more interested in their jobs than in the severe earthquake all around them. The movie did keep me watching, so I rate it at five.

Very bad, I bought this as I have a soft spot for bad films, I love seeing eric roberts swinging from ropes on the top of a high rise tower or gary busey diving about in a wet suit. I've seen the previous and although bad it's funny and kind of entertaining, this however is atrocious, it's not just because the plot is terrible or not one of the characters are believable or the fact the effects are, if not stolen from somewhere else, a total joke, it's the fact that Daniels is so annoying, his acting, accent, mistimed bad jokes and personality are all nauseating. The others aren't much better the leading actress is about as convincing as my granny as an fbi agent and the bit with the old guy in the elevator, with the most annoying two youngsters I have ever seen in a film, was the final straw. The only good thing in the film was Fahey, but his character was under developed maybe if he was in it a bit more it could have been a bit better.

Definitely in the top ten worst films I've ever watched, just slightly ahead of crazy six.

EPICENTER is an epically cheesy B-movie that attempts to cross the disaster and spy-thriller genres with limited success. Not only is it all over the place tonally, but it's also an extraordinarily low budget production that has just enough money to pay the cast members but little left over for anything else.

What could have been an excruciating viewing experience turns out to be an absolutely hilarious film thanks to the producer's willingness to steal various sequences from other, better movies. No less than four films are ripped off here, making this one of the craziest cut 'n' paste flicks I've seen outside of Godfrey Ho's production studio.

The most notable steal is from Eddie Murphy's METRO, and involves a car chase and then an out-of-control tram sequence. The funniest part is that, in METRO, Murphy himself is driving one of the cars, and in this film it's some white Russian gangster guy. No attempt is made to hide Murphy's face in the long shots, so as you can imagine it's pretty psychedelic to watch.

Other, shorter steals are from SPEED (the out-of-control elevator scene) and MONEY TRAIN (a subway crash), and then there's an extensive rip from THE GREAT LOS ANGELES EARTHQUAKE later on towards the end; the effects in this are really cheesy, and make me wanna track down that made-for-TV B-movie.

Sadly, this brass-necked cribbing of footage from other movies is the most interesting thing about the story, which involves Traci Lords and Gary Daniels on the run from Russians and corrupt FBI agents. Lords is a horrible actress, and Daniels is wasted in a role that requires him to do virtually no martial arts. Why cast a martial artist if you're not going to use him for his talent? Oh, that's right, because you've got nobody to choreograph any fights for your movie.

Watch out for a clearly embarrassed Jeff Fahey giving one of his cheesiest performances as a generic villain. Later, wonder how the slightly suspenseful opening bit of subterfuge eventually gives way to endless inanity and Z-grade movie chaos. Because EPICENTER is one of those films that's only worth watching to check out just how bad it is.

Amanda Foster's an undercover FBI agent with a fifteen-year-old daughter. She's been working undercover for a year trying to bust, (pun intended, judging from what I've read of the reviews of porn movies,) a Russian Organizatzia plot to get their hands on plans that would make all American stealth fighters obsolete. Who's the culprit? Nick Constantine, an employee of Global Technology. Why? Nick's wife died of leukemia and Global Tech's insurance carrier wouldn't pay for the experimental treatment until it was too late. So he steals the plans and decides to sell them to the Russians. Amanda's daughter, Robyn, is in a gymnastics class but Amanda can't take her because of her job. Nick shows up at a strip club that the bad guys are using as front. Amanda's cover's blown. Her superiors, especially the SAC in San Francisco says that it's no longer safe. They have to send Nick to Los Angeles. Amanda asks to escort him there. Her boss refuses but she insists. She goes home to pack and calls for Robyn. She's gone. She's already left for Los Angeles. Amanda and Constantine arrive in Los Angeles and meet with Agent Moore at a rooftop restaurant. A traffic reporter for an LA radio station is airborne when the earthquake hits. Robyn and her friend Brian are supposed to meet Amanda at a coffee bar. They're on their way up to the observation deck when the earthquake hits. What happens next? See for yourself.

This movie has the best stunt scenes I have ever seen! I was totally gripped by one of the best 15 minutes in movie cinematic history during the "cadilac" scene. All that carnage happening with people only inches away; It is worth putting your re player on loop just to watch that scene over and over again! The next best stunt scene in the universe is the earthquake scene sure watching the buildings shake on the outside seemed weak enough but it did not distract from the overall thrill ride that I got from the next 20 minutes. This move should be put in a museum and preserved for generations upon generation for the masterpiece that it is. I compare it watching an ECW match back in the day!