Mmm, tv disaster movie

For some reason, the SciFi Channel persists in putting out original made-for-tv movies. They're never good, but occasionally, one looks so mind-blowingly horrendous that I absolutely have to watch it. Such was the case with this evening's "Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York".

First off, I saw this movie in 1997, when it was called "Volcano". Someone at SciFi apparently saw "Volcano" and thought, "What we need is a much crappier version of this, with almost no recognizable stars and really awful special effects." The lava effects looked like a 10-year-old drew them with crayons. And I'm no volcano expert, but I'm pretty sure that lava flows a lot slower than water... Not that I'm going to get into any of the factual puzzlers, like how a house could fill up with lava and not catch fire, so then a guy could open the front door and have a big wave of lava sweep over him... that scene was awesome.

If you've seen "Volcano", you've seen "Disaster Zone". A geologist tries to tell everyone that there's a volcano building beneath the city, nobody believes her until it erupts, and they end up routing the lava through some tunnels to get it to the ocean. It's the SAME MOVIE. A bunch of the main characters were tunnel drillers, and I thought, "They wouldn't use the exact same resolution that 'Volcano' had, would they? Using the tunnels to reroute the lava to the ocean? They're not THAT lame, right?" And then, so help me, they did it.

This movie made me laugh so hard I was in tears. Thank you, SciFi Original Pictures. Don't ever change.