When I was a kid, I was convinced that Dante’s Peak was one of the scariest movies on earth, right up there with Anaconda. With obvious cinematic expertise, these two films put their finger on the pulse of a young me and exploited my deepest, most profound fears: giant snakes and being forced to wade through acid.
Sure, I didn’t specifically have either of those fears before I watched their respective movies, but I sure as hell had them afterwards. Years later, Dante’s Peak remains, for me, not “the volcano movie,” and still less “the volcano movie that’s not Volcano,” but rather “the one with the acid.” (I’m not the only one, either. Enough people apparently thought, “I was prepared for lava, but now there’s an acid lake? What the hell, volcanoes?” that it led to a Royal Society of Chemistry article entitled “Acid lakes: Do they exist and would they dissolve a boat?” The answer is yes.)
I revisited Dante’s Peak recently, and while Elizabeth Hoffman in the acid lake reamins the most memorable part for me, I’m relieved to see that its effects are considerably muted by the fact that the film is not, well, good. It’s disaster movie schlock that’s never better than it needs to be, and it takes an agonizingly long time to actually get its disaster started. It’s also too much of a Franken-movie, and you can see its unimaginatively copied influences stitched together with heavy black thread. What did Jaws ever do to deserve this?
However, if there is such a thing as an enjoyable mediocre movie, this is it. You’ve got Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton as the leads, and while Dante’s Peak doesn’t give them nearly enough space to shine, they’re still charismatic as hell. In particular, Pierce Brosnan, glasses-wearing volcanologist whose last girlfriend was cruelly slain by a volcano, is a romantic fantasy drawn in such bold colors that it almost feels mean-spirited to mock it. Sure, his back story is unintentionally hilarious, and sure, he’s a blandly flawless paragon to the point that his own boss stops the movie dead to solemnly announce that Brosnan was right all along, but … it’s a 1997 Pierce Brosnan. This is who you cast if you want to get away with this kind of thing.
“Unintentionally hilarious” is basically the modus operandi here, as a Jason Voorhees-like volcano pounces upon two hot springs-canoodling teenagers and adorable dogs heroically leap to safety. My favorite subcategory here, though, is the unintentionally hilarious line deliveries. Arabella Field, playing another volcanologist, gets the worst of it with a stagey, over-enunciated, winking pronouncement that sure, the town of Dante’s Peak, nested at the foot of a volcano, is lovely and serene: “Just like Pompeii.” Of course, sometimes it’s the dialogue itself that’s at fault, as when Brosnan announces that he travels to “wherever there’s a volcano with attitude,” or when the scientists struggle to evoke pathos by musing that, hey, if one of them dies submerged in lava, at least they “got to see the show.” We do not, alas, get to see someone being reassured by this after getting partly dissolved in acid.
Ultimately, Dante’s Peak achieves its destiny by always being just entertaining enough to keep you watching until the commercial break. Truly, if basic cable didn’t exist, Dante’s Peak would have had to invent it.
Dante’s Peak is streaming on Tubi.
