MegaFault (2009)

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

That was an excellent one.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I don't get all these bad reviews. This is not a big budget Hollywood movie. Why judge it as one? This is a made-for-tv flick and using that standard this movie is more than OK. It was nice to see Murphy play a serious role. It is too bad she is no longer with us. She could have gone on to be an A list actor.

MEGAFAULT, a TV movie disaster flick, opens with the words that no viewer should ever witness: A SyFy Channel presentation of an Asylum movie. Yep, two of the dumbest purveyors of no-budget trash have teamed up to make an earthquake-themed disaster flick, so what could go wrong?The answer is everything and nothing. This is very much par for the course for such a movie: it's a film without much plot or indeed characterisation, one which gets by instead on a series of repetitive CGI effects of faults and cracks tearing through the ground, swallowing buildings and vehicles. When this happens for the umpteenth time you know that the writers were really struggling to think up anything fresh with this one.Cast-wise, we get Brittany Murphy as the intrepid seismologist heroine; this was one of her last roles before her untimely death and she's not looking at all healthy. Speaking of death, we're treated to another actor with a dead career: Eriq La Salle, formerly of TV's E.R., now treading water in a B-movie swamp. Bruce Davison appears too, contributing yet another adviser type part; I guess he never gets tired of showing up in such productions.The CGI effects are a little better than those found in some other Asylum productions, but they're hardly the stuff of greatness either. Not much really happens during the storyline, and there's never much of a sense of danger, just characters reacting to the latest CGI event taking place in front of them. It's not much fun.

Wow, that was bad, bad, bad. It was one of those movies that was so bad, that it would be faster to list what was good rather than what was bad.The bad - acting, writing, plot, character development, SGI, basic scientific principles.My favorite idiotic comment was when the military man proudly exclaimed that the enemy wouldn't even know that a satellite-induced earthquake was actually an attack (as opposed to an act of God), since the "ice turns back into water". Um, don't you think that they would notice the GIANT COLD BEAM coming out of the sky??!!?? The good - Yep, just like some parts of a standardized test, that line "is intentionally left blank". No redeeming qualities at all. I can't even justify giving it a one out of ten. I was forced into being that polite because the system won't let me give the score it deserves.Suddenly, Howard the Duck doesn't seem that bad after all.

A disaster movie in every respect: a computer-generated script (and someone forgot to take his finger off the Insert Cliché Here button); lousy SFX which must have cost all of $29.99 from Crap FX R US; truly atrocious 'acting' by charisma-bypassed 'actors'; more holes in the plot than I can even begin to remember; a technological 'fix' of breath-taking stupidity; unconvincing 'characters' ~ more like cardboard cut-outs being blown about in a gale of tedium and futility; need I go on? Furthermore, I don't know who Brittany Murphy is but she has all the charm of a burst appendix. Apart from that, it was pretty good.