Firequake (2014)

I am a lover of B-Movies and usually the worse the better. I say this because usually the writer, director, and actors will generally try to give us something entertaining - and I thank them for that, a lot of my happiest times have been in front of B-Movies. However, there are times, such as this, when it appears that nobody really gave a damn about the film. Which is a shame as the concept isn't too bad for an ecological disaster flick. As we are running out of fuel we need to find new ways to generate power and Dr Eve Carter, played by Alexandra Paul, has come up with a way to use the sustainable energy from magma to create clean and free energy. The trouble is that this is where the writer ran out of good ideas and hit the cliche book for inspiration. Everything from here on out is so "By The Book" it's risible and ridiculous... and very boring as we've seen it all before. I have to give credit to Paul and her co-star Browne who played Killian, as these obviously didn't get the memo and decided to actually try and give a decent acting job with the script and direction they were given. Sorry to say that this just wasn't enough. The worst actress, by far, was Barker who played Dr Carter's daughter, Nikki. Though she was supposed to be sixteen she looked to be more in her thirties and delivered her lines with the force of a sledgehammer. As for the rest of the actors, well they ranged from dire to wooden.The direction of the film didn't help any as the director was very poor at creating an atmosphere of tension and excitement. He just plods the audience along with the story. Instead of sitting on the edge of my seat I was twiddling my fingers in an effort to stay awake. Even the special effects that were on offer were substandard - they didn't even rise to the dizzying heights of poor. The one thing that made me smile was that all the roads in Prague appear to lead to the same intersection. When Dr Carter and her daughter are searching the town for a pharmacist and insulin, they seem to get stuck in a temporal location warp. Which doesn't allow them to leave one particularly badly staged intersection. It's also amazing that in all of Prague the bad guy can home in on them amazingly fast.There's an awful lot wrong with this motion picture and very little that's right... and nothing to recommend anybody to watch. Stay well clear of this film.

If I would want to be really tolerant, I could. I could forget about the terribly written and absolutely predictable plot. I could forget the countless number of mistakes according to Czech Republic, European culture and language barriers...I mean how could not a single person in the movie speak Czech? How could Czech cops have cars with the signs spelling 'Police' instead of 'Policie' as it should? I could forget the low cost effects and the budget-friendly repeated use of scenes. I could forget the necessity of US army to come and heroically save the day and I could even forget the shots of definitely non-Czech looking post-apocalyptic ruins. I could forget the awkward and irrelevant happy ending set it what looks like an Italian suburbs. But the ONE thing I can't forget is, that the "superhero mom" who is a leading scientist wants to treat her daughter's low blood sugar with insulin. This movie is a joke.

Such a shame that a decent, if far-fetched, idea was wasted by truly dreadful execution. SyFy have made some tolerable movies, a lot of bad ones and an even larger amount of trash. Firequake is in the trash category and one of their worst in a long time.Firequake is a very cheap-looking movie, everything looks very drab and the camera work and editing looks as if composed in a hurry. The special effects fare even worse, yes it is low budget but is that a good enough excuse for a lack of effort and the effects looking so fake and like they belong somewhere else? Not to me. The music is incredibly generic and sometimes like a monotonous drone, nothing interesting or memorable here.Even by SyFy standards, the script is very stilted and cliché-ridden, with forced attempts at humour, lots of gibberish passing for sci-fi and logic, plodding and often irrelevant exposition and painfully ham-fisted melodrama. The story is dull and manages to be both ridiculous and over-serious. The idea is decent but it all feels half-baked and without any tension or sense. The characters are cardboard and even more clichéd than the writing, some managing to be annoying(especially the main teenage character), while the direction is flat and the acting is a mess of overwrought and completely disengaged.Overall, had potential but a disaster all round. 1/10 Bethany Cox

I had never heard of this film, knew nothing about it. I expected something of decent quality, my expectations were destroyed. Very poor acting, poor quality film. Calling it a B movie rates it too high. This is a C or a D movie. What really set me off was that the film was supposed to be set in Czech Republic, yet the police, the dam workers,the gas station workers, and everyone in the film did not speak Czech and had American accents. If you are going to make a film based in Czech Republic, at least hire Czech actors. As the movie goes on, it gets more difficult to digest and follow with interest. Probably one of the worst movies I have ever seen.