The next of my posts about movies which I studied for my article “Disaster Narratives by Design: Is Japan Different?” is about Volcano (Mick Jackson, 1997), which came out in the same year as Dante’s Peak, the subject of my previous post. A summary on IMDb for Volcano is as follows.
Something unspeakably chilling is ultimately starting to heat up at The City of Los Angeles! Beneath the famed La Brea Tar Pits, a raging volcano has formed, raining a storm of deadly fire bombs and an endless tide of white-hot lava upon the stunned city!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120461/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
As noted in the post about Dante’s Peak, Volcano got classified as ‘science fiction’ on IMDb. Perhaps someone out there can suggest how the underlying story could be true, but, the way in which the disaster itself unfolds and how it is responded to seems particularly unbelievable. While he may have helped to save LA in the movie, even Tommy Lee Jones couldn’t save this movie from being disastrous.
In terms of the revised list of conventions that I developed as part of my article “Disaster Narratives by Design: Is Japan Different?“, the movie scored a 14 out of the 17, further confirming, as I concluded in the article itself, that just because a movie has many of the elements that are required to be a disaster movie doesn’t guarantee that it will actually be any good.
Christopher P. Hood 
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