622. Airplane vs. Volcano (2014)

Starring: Dean Cain, Robin Givens, Tamara Goodwin

Director: James Kondelik, Jon Kondelik

Running Time: 90 mins

Airplane vs. Volcano is an American film about an aeroplane that flies into a ring of erupting volcanoes, and the passengers on board, with the pilots dead, must find a way to survive, without landing the plane. For 90 minutes. Even though they’re only a couple of thousand feet above the sea…

This is by far and away the best Asylum film I’ve ever seen. In comparison to the likes of Sharknado and Titanic II, the visual effects in this film are pretty good, the acting, while still quite wooden, is definitely better, and the whole story, while predictable and extremely idiotic, is not at all irritating, rather often entertaining.

But before we get all giddy, let’s not get away from the fact that this is still a terrible film. From the start, it’s so predictable, the characters are totally one-dimensional, and the dialogue and scripting as a whole is just appalling.

The main reason, however, that I consider this to be a significantly better film than any of the other Asylum productions is that I wasn’t grinding my teeth to sawdust in this one. Normally, the excuse for these ‘mockbusters’ is that they’re a bit of harmless fun, but I feel that they’re normally so bad that they become extremely frustrating to watch.

However, I was slightly entertained by this film. While I still think it’s an appallingly dumb idea, it somehow manages to be enjoyable. And it’s not even in a so-bad-it’s-good, laughably bad sort of way, but it genuinely managed to entertain me.

Despite that, the writing in this film was absolutely terrible. It’s by far and away the worst part of this film, and was what really stopped me from properly enjoying this, due to its glaring plot holes, terrible dialogue, and poorly developed characters.

Basically, a plane flying around in circles in the middle of a ring of some of the largest volcanoes on Earth, for 90 minutes, just a few thousand feet above sea level? No. Opening the cabin doors while the plane is travelling several hundred miles an hour to let someone climb onto the wings? No.

There’s all those problems with realism, but the major problem is the randomness of the characters. Some appear on screen from time to time and just become a completely different person to what you saw five minutes ago, and that was definitely the most irritating part of the entire film.

Overall, this gets a 4.0, because despite being terrible as usual, it’s not as bad as the title would suggest.