Today’s issue of Dust On The VCR is a subscriber request! This explosive film was chosen by my good friend Aaron Tallo, whom I met many years ago through Birmingham’s music scene back when I was writing concert reviews. Aaron and I have kicked it countless times over the years, but he was present for two of my most important life events. He was my copilot on my last trip to South By Southwest as a freelance journalist (it was worth it for the free badges alone). And, because he’s an Ole Miss graduate, I was his copilot when the Rebels beat Alabama in Oxford (sorry, Bammers). In other words, I owe him my life, but he’ll have to settle for 700 words about Dante’s Peak. Anyway. Want to request a film for a future issue? Subscribe to the paid version!
An interesting thing happened when I pulled up Dante’s Peak on Amazon.
Before I could even read the synopsis of the film, my eyes were drawn to the genre labels that Bezos had chosen. The first two, “action” and “adventure,” made sense. I expected the word “disaster” to be listed third, since it’s a pretty prevalent subgenre by now. Instead, it was merely two adjectives. “Intense.” “Serious.” Seriously.
Is Dante’s Peak a “serious” film? Who’s to say? In my eyes, it’s fun and entertaining, if a bit silly at times. Intense, maybe, but not very serious. Then again, it belongs to a specific subset of cinema that I take…perhaps more seriously than I should: mid-to-late 90s disaster movies.
I’ve toyed with the idea of writing an entire essay collection on these films—American disaster movies released from 1995 to 1999. I believe it’s inarguably the apex of the subgenre, and I think a convergence of factors is responsible for its cultural dominance over this five-year span. So consider me publicly dipping my toe into these analytical waters for the first time in today’s newsletter. (Let’s just hope the water hasn’t been turned into acid by an active volcano.)
Dante’s Peak is one of the major players here—and not just because it was one of multiple “two movies about the same thing in the same year” convergences.* It landed right in the middle of the wave, both capitalizing on the couple years of disaster films that came before it and helping maintain the pace for the remainder of the decade. And for an early February release, Dante’s Peak was a pretty decent hit, pulling in $67 million in the U.S. and $111 million overseas.
By 1997, two decades after Jaws and Star Wars created the blockbuster, the box office was still riding high. The “summer movie season” had been around for years, and films like Dante’s Peak proved that audiences didn’t just show up to theaters when school was out. Moviegoers had developed an appetite for entertainment that needed to be satiated year-round.
This was also an era that wasn’t yet dominated by sequels. So all a movie needed was a good hook and a couple of decent movie stars to put butts in seats. “What if there was a volcano that nobody expected to erupt…and then it erupted? Oh, and it stars the newest James Bond and John Connor’s mom.” What more do you need, right?
There’s another major factor that played into the rise of the 90s disaster movie, though: CGI was getting just good enough to get the job done. Jurassic Park (kind of a disaster movie, mostly a monster movie) helped usher in decent CGI employed scarcely for effect—a complement to practical effects rather than a total replacement. And from there, Hollywood never looked back. Dante’s Peak was mostly shot on location in the town of Wallace, Idaho, so the natural splendor was already there as a scenic backdrop. They just had to make a nearby mountain kinda look like it was spewing smoke and ash, then add some digital lava to consume houses and stuff. Does it look great? No. It’s not terrible, though. And I bet it looked pretty good in 1997.
But the most interesting reason for this subgenre’s rapid rise is the least tangible one: Y2K, baby!
This is the crux of my fascination with the topic. Did a relatively unrelated rise of disaster movies help fuel the pre-millennium panic of the late 90s? Or was it the other way around and millions of anxious viewers were watching these films as a way of coping with our possible destruction?** I think it has to be a little bit of Column A, a little bit of Column B…and I think there’s a worthwhile exploration to be made with such an idea.***
As for the chapter on Dante’s Peak—or maybe Dante’s Peak, Volcano, and Volcano: Fire On the Mountain (also released in 1997!)—it would be a doozy. All manner of natural disasters are pretty terrifying, and even goofy things like giant monsters and alien invaders can evoke some feelings of mild panic. But there’s something a little more poetic about an extinction-level event caused by something hiding in plain sight that has the potential to burn us alive. Really gives you a hankering for hot buttered popcorn and ice-cold Coca-Cola, doesn’t it?
*We all know about Armageddon and Deep Impact in 1998. But did you know that a Hallmark film called Tornado! was released a mere three days before Twister in 1996? It stars Bruce Campbell and Ernie Hudson. I am not making this up.
**I like to imagine people in the late 90s watching these disaster movies and then listening to Busta Rhymes on the ride home, whose first three albums—released in 1996, 1997, and 1998—were laced with Y2K panic.
***One piece of evidence to consider would be a comparison with earlier disaster films released during the Cold War. There was certainly apocalypse dread in those days, but there was no ticking clock for that version of impending doom. And, yes, it was simply harder to portray large-scale disasters on the big screen before CGI became more commonplace.
Dante’s Peak is now streaming on Starz and DirecTV, and it is available for rent elsewhere.
That makes so much sense about Y2K. For the record that disaster movie essay collection sounds rad, would read!!
I've re-watched this within the last couple of years and I would dare say that it still holds up. I saw this in the theatres in 1997 and I can still remember the cringe I felt during the "row, row, row your boat" scene and the facepalm-inducing decision by the grandmother to jump ship into the acid water when it looked pretty obvious to me that the boat was close enough to the opposite bank that her decision was stupid and unnecessary.