Written by Evan Purcell, April 26, 2016, at 6:30 a.m.
Every Tuesday, we’ll take a look at another mockbuster from the company that brought you Snakes on a Train, Transmorphers, and Alien vs. Hunter. This week, stuff blows up in Apocalypse Pompeii.
Apocalypse Pompeii Mockbuster
Early in the film Apocalypse Pompeii, the main characters arrive at the titular ruins. “Welcome to Pompeii,” one of them exclaims. We get a huge swell of orchestral music, and the camera pans across the most underwhelming ruins in cinema history. We see about three crumbling walls and less than a dozen bored-looking tourists, but the background music makes it sound like we’ve just climbed Mount Everest. This moment is Apocalypse Pompeii in a nutshell: a very small, very low-budget film that tries and tries to be something bigger than it actually is. You gotta give it credit for that.
Apocalypse Pompeii is the 2014 mockbuster version of Pompeii, the historical action film starring Kiefer Sutherland and that guy from Game of Thrones. Unlike its bigger budget sister film, this is not about gladiators. It’s not even a period piece. Instead, it’s the kind of fun, generic disaster flick that gets down to business as efficiently as possible. Characters arrive in Pompeii, we get about a minute of exposition, and then BOOM! There’s already a volcanic tremor. You gotta love a movie like that.
Unfortunately, the film actually starts with a teaser that is completely baffling in its irrelevance. The opening shot is of that giant Jesus statue from Brazil, and then we see a family living in the Galapagos Islands (which, to be noted, is not in Brazil). They race away from an exploding volcano, but their car blows up at the last second. Does this volcano have anything to do with the one in Pompeii? Is there some sort of underground chain of interconnected volcanoes ready to burst? Nope. This has nothing to do with anything. Come on, movie. You can do better than that! How about a teaser set in ancient Pompeii? Lord knows you have enough leftover sandals from Almighty Thor.
Thankfully, once the plot kicks into gear, the movie knows exactly how to deliver the goods. Early on, we get the much needed ticking clock, a vital component of any disaster flick. In this case, we have just under four hours before “the entire city is buried under sixty feet of lava.” With a single line of dialogue, we have a reason to care about what happens.
More importantly, though, the film does an excellent job of escalating tension. It delivers a series of increasingly horrifying obstacles, and then shows how our heroes use their smarts and strength to overcome them. At one point, a side character asks, “How are we gonna die next?” and that is the perfect question to sum up this movie. In case you were wondering, here are the escalating dangers: shaking, flying rocks, heat surge, mudslide, poisonous fumes, and lava. By showcasing each disaster in such a systematic manner, the movie is maintaining its suspense throughout. The only downside to this tactic is that a volcano movie really shouldn’t withhold the oozing lava until the last fifteen minutes of the film. That seems a little cheap.
Apocalypse Pompeii’s basic premise should be familiar to anybody who has ever seen a disaster movie. An overprotective father takes his wife and only child to a new city. He warns them to be safe. A disaster strikes (in this case, a giant volcano erupts directly over them) and he must race against lava to find them and bring them back to safety. Substitute “volcano” with “earthquake” or “flood” or “alien invasion,” and you get a dozen other movies. The heroic dad is played by Adrian Paul (TV’s Highlander), and the new city is a weirdly underpopulated Naples, just outside of the Pompeii ruins. He’s there on business, trying to start an international security firm (something kept purposely vague because who cares?).
This bare bones plot fulfills the minimum requirements of a disaster movie, allowing most of the runtime to be filled with some nice, low-budget action. We get some good fire work, as a man thrashes around with a burning arm for an excruciatingly long scene. We get decent CGI rocks and mudslides and helicopter explosions. Everything feels just slightly more legit than it actually is.
The only real give-away that this is a low, low budget film—besides the D-list star and a few extras that are slightly flabbier than those in a Hollywood film—is how underpopulated everything feels. There aren’t nearly enough people running and screaming in the backgrounds. Naples is a thriving city, but it feels like a Utah suburb that offered tax incentives to the filmmakers. Basically, the only people in the city are the bureaucrats who try to get in our hero’s way. For a good chunk of the movie, our hero rushes through Naples and gets a whole bunch of variations on the phrase: “Sorry. Can’t help you.” One soldier even says, “We’ll shoot you if you don’t turn around.” This type of man-against-man conflict could be interesting, but in this film, it’s much less interesting than the man-against-lava parts.
Throughout all of this, Apocalypse Pompeii embraces all the action movie clichés in such an on-the-nose, obvious way, that the whole thing feels almost adorable. For example, one character declares, “I would die to live in Italy,” and less than two seconds later, there’s a volcanic tremor. We have a stoic hero who’s seen things in combat, but only wants to rescue his family in time. We have the old war buddy who saves everyone at the last minute. We have a host of supporting characters with a single defining characteristic to make them memorable. (One takes pictures of everything, and another one is obsessed with coffee.) Virtually everything in the film feels like Action Movie 101, and I kind of love the film for it.
By the last act of the movie, father and family reunite at a museum that’s completely surrounded by lava. Their only plan for escape—a helicopter—gets destroyed by falling chunks of volcano. By this point, the plotting has gotten a little wonky. For example, the characters seem to run to the roof of the museum, then to the basement, then back to the roof again for no discernable reason. Still, things are reasonably enjoyable, even when a side character swoops in and saves them in one of the most shameless examples of deus ex machina I’ve seen in a while.
With most of our heroes alive and a (nearly empty) city smoldering into the ground, we get the last bit of voice-over for the film: “Pompeii is still standing.” And it is. Nothing can destroy these ruins, it seems. Not even an hour and 20 minutes of passable special effects.
***
Evan Purcell is the headmaster of a tiny private school in Zanzibar. In addition to writing mildly condescending reviews of bad films, he also writes everything from romance novels to horror stories. Check out his blog and Amazon author page. And in the meantime, if a volcano is erupting behind you, drive faster!
