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Rescuing the movie a bit is that it, unsurprisingly, features everything you would expect from a disaster movie: humans who don’t believe disaster is imminent, a secretly evil general, many, many noble sacrifices and - of course, what else would you expect from a movie about flooding - people getting compartmentalized/trapped to die.

But the effects are pedestrian, the acting stifling, and the overall feel of the movie underwhelming. Please don’t make a sequel, remake or reinvention of this movie, ever.

3. Volcano Not only is this movie a clear knock off of the infinitely more entertaining and well-made Dante’s Peak, it is a ridiculous and overly produced one at that.

As you know, the story centers around a mysterious and unexplained force: a Volcano appearing in the middle of Los Angeles. Leaving aside your feelings for the City of Angels for a moment, Los Angeles deserves a better fate in disaster movies than this. Falling completely into the ocean, as, for example, the makers of 2012 imagined, seems much more topical to that city. Instead, the city has to settle for some contrived explanation about the relationship between the La Brea tar pits and magma.

Worse, the city has to deal with Tommy Lee Jones as the unlikely, unwitting, and flawed hero. Triple Ugh. And did you remember that Anne Heche was in the movie? Yeah.

And (spoilers ahead) the end line, that the Volcano, now named for the boulevard on which it appeared, is still in an active state, just adds insult to all the injury caused by the ridiculous way in which the movie deals with a disaster of such proportions in a city of that size: simply divert the lava into the ocean. Right.

Saving the movie a bit is a few of the extra horrific noble sacrifice scenes - people jumping into the lava to save someone else and what not - as well as the hot scenes of lava and ash heaps crushing innocent victims. In other words, the only redeeming quality of the movie is its good death scenes. That says a lot about it.

Last but not least, by the way: the effects are singularly terrible.

2. Earthquake

The counterpart to The Towering Inferno, and released the same year, Earthquake is in many ways similar to the movie I placed on my top five list. It features a cast of well-known actors including Charlton Heston, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Ava Gardner, and George Kennedy. And, better than Volcano, it at least gives the city of Los Angeles a proper destruction: an Earthquake.

But the film is singularly bad not so much for what’s in it, but because of what’s not. Don’t get me wrong, it has its fair share of disaster movie clichés, from the unsuspecting human victims, noble sacrifices, and difficult choices. No, the problem is that the movie isn’t as much a disaster epic as it is a survival/suspense drama.

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