DEEP DANTE, PEAK IMPACT

I remember when the big three disaster movies came out of Hollywood in the Nineties: Dantes peak, Deep Impact and Twister.

These three movies seemed to blow a good and welcome deal of lava and gust into a sagging sub-genre at the time.

OK, there were other disaster movies around like Armageddon and Lake Placid [a disaster if the croc got you!] but to me they were side salad to the main course.

Dante's Peak has always stuck in my mind, a sort of Jaws for the volcano film. It just all came together and then ... blew apart. It was also a geography lesson dressed up as a movie and I'm sure even modern teachers use it in class. Pyroclastic clouds, vents and lava flows. Its all there for the budding vulcanologist. They were great special effects. Even the acting wasn't too bad: Pierce Brosnan as the unreliable boffin who cried wolf once before and for us TERMINATOR fans Linda Hamilton got time off from saving the future and just had to save the town. Not sure if it spawned any toys but I enjoyed the Peak and still do.

Deep Impact had a ... well deep impact on me. I remember so many scenes in it even now decades later so it must have done. A modern twist on the old trope of the earthbound meteor, I just sort of loved this whole film. At the start when the scientist is chomping a huge sloppy slice of pizza, is shocked to see the trajectory of the meteor on his screen, whereupon he hastily shoves discs and stuff in an envelope and drives off at speed to alert the sleeping world. He even abandoned the best slice of pizza I've ever seen and sadly crashed his car. There are many more scenes I could wax lyrical about: President Morgan Freeman telling Journo Tia Leoni it only seemed like she had him over a barrel; when Tia Leoni joins her estranged Dad on a beach where they wait for the impact's tidal wave to sweep them away and perhaps the stand-out scene, where the 'kids' stand on the hill at the end of the film staring up at the two vast meteorite chunks [I think its two] hurtling to Earth. There's just something about how they stare up helplessly at these harbingers of global doom that got me. Again, I can't imagine any Deep Impact toys but it's meteoric mate Armageddon brought us a few I think.

Twister is the least memorable of the three for me. I think it was the late great Bill Paxton as the lead scientist, this time running into tornadoes instead of xenomorphs. I remember the F scale being introduced to us all and I imagine like me everyone tried to not think aboput an F1 tornado landing near our homes. I can't think of any stand-out scenes as there was basically a lot of car driving and funnels of superfast wind everywhere. They did chuck a crate of mini-ball-sensors into one twister to see what would happen. Doubt if the subject matter lent itself to toys but I'd watch the flick again.

Did you watch the big three disasters of the Nineties? Would you include different disaster films from back then?