Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Rest in Peace Brittany Murphy. As a matter of fact in your honor I am scarfing down a handful of Mentos right now. And I don’t even like Mentos. Brittany, as if you could actually hear me, I watched your movie ‘Megafault’ last night… a movie that is the bastard child of the Sci-Fi Channel and The Asylum. Not exactly peanut butter and chocolate right there those two great tastes. As it turns out I was entertained by this movie, hugely so…. STOP! WAIT! Before you toilet paper my house recognize that ‘Megafault’ is horrible. Absolutely horrible, and I will remember Ms. Murphy more from the last movie I saw in before this one in ‘Across the Hall’ but if you watch this movie I HIGHLY recommend that you watch it with a group of friends because it is a hoot and it will bring you and your friends joyous laughter and merriment. A few adult beverages won’t hurt either. Now if you go into this movie wearing your ultra serious mad-on critic face all prepared to deconstruct and evaluate, then you’ll just end up tossing yourself off the tallest building. Don’t do that.

Our film starts with the character of Boomer about to blow up some mountains. His name is Boomer and he blows up stuff. How’s that for clever? Boomer is played by Eriq LaSalle who had two expression levels in this movie with one being extreme irritability and the other being extreme boredom. After Boomer blows up these mountains a crack forms in the earth and runs like 250 miles until it gets to Washington D.C. While they kept assuring Boomer that his mountain exploding stuff wasn’t the thing caused this Megafault Tectonic Shift which is in the process of destroying the world… we know better. It’s ALL his fault.

This brings super seismologist Dr. Amy Lane (Murphy) into the mix who has been training all her life for just this type of situation. Dispatched by her boss Dr. Rhodes Amy jumps into action, first by digging Boomers F150 out of the earth somehow and now by assessing the problem. Just so you know Boomer will be around for about 99.99% of the movie… we’re not going tell you about the .01% that he’s not

around… but Boomer has a lot of movie type ‘come in handy’ skills, like the ability to fly helicopters, The HAM radio frequency knowledge gene, the ability to steal and the gift of blowing shit up.

To cut to the chase this fissure that is racing across the U.S. needs to be redirected to the Grand Canyon and the way they chose to ‘redirect an earthquake’ is a trip all in itself, but instead they redirected this fissure to Yellowstone which is pretty much going blow up the earth once it hits. What they need to do is somehow create another Grand Canyon. In like two hours. Sure would ‘come in handy’ if we had somebody nearby who knew how to blow shit up real good.

I’ve seen a bunch of Sci-Fi movies and I’ve seen a bunch of Asylum movies but we clearly could see where it took a team effort to pull this classic off. Probably the best part of the flick was the fancy earthquake chatter that so freely rolled off the characters tongues in this movie. When an Army tech goes ‘Oh no… the satellite tectonic freeze device has ignited the volcanic aquifer…’ you can only sit there and mutter… ‘Dear God… Anything but that…’ Man, I loved that fake earthquake talk. This movie was full of cinematic nuggets. You may be familiar with being thrown from cars and somehow walking away unharmed but how often have you seen someone thrown from a crashing C-130 and walking away… not only unharmed but better than you were before you got on the plane in the first place? That’s sweet! Or observe that same woman healthy woman in the blue blouse somehow manage to get burnt up in Wyoming, flee in terror D.C., avalanched in Vail and then crushed in Lexington. Or watch our somewhat sickly looking star repel down a mountain to save our trapped Blow Up Shit guy from his F-150 while the helicopter pilot with muscles popping out of his neck, played by the muscle bound Paul Logan, looks on in complete fear and terror. If you ever wonder about where my main man Paul Logan is just pick up an Asylum flick as you are bound to find him hanging out with his guns exposed.

One of my personal faves in this movie involved the Blow Shit Up Dude named Boomer… clever… needing a diversion so he could steal a helicopter. We see him look into a port-a-potty, quickly exit, then look into the next one and go in. Seconds later after exiting, that second port-a-potty goes kablooey. My question is what DIDN’T the first port-a-potty have in it that was necessary to make it blow up? I shudder at the thought. I hate to spoil it, though you probably knew this already, but I think one of the reasons for Eriq LaSalle’s apparent irritability in this movie was that he had to pretty much save the planet earth only to be the Black Guy who has to die. As he was descending into that deep crevice straight to hell, instead of ‘acting’ or anything like that he just kind of threw his arms up in the air and was like ‘This is some bullshit.’ And that was all she wrote. I will say that Brittany Murphy’s spectacular overacting while LaSalle was descending into hell more than made up for Eriq’s lack thereof.

Sure ‘Megafault’ isn’t a good movie in the grand scheme things. Despite all the fake explosions and the toy cars falling into cracks it still managed to be rather boring at some times and it was fairly stupid almost all of the time. Even the most viable film director would have trouble making a crack running through the ground into an effective villain, and not that I’m saying anything and despite my love for director David Michael Latt and all of the good that he does at his company The Asylum, to the point that I am actively petitioning them to give me a job…. He’s not really a viable director. I realize saying this might affect my ability to gain employment but at least I’m honest and that’s gotta be worth something isn’t it? Yes there are more problems that we could talk about with this movie but you know… that’s counterproductive. But if you are even the slightest bit curious to see what happens when two Megapower corporations get together to make a Megapower movie called ‘MegaFault’… who could seriously ask for more than this?