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Oct 19, 20153 min read

Earthfall (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

Updated: Apr 4, 2020


Earthfall

Earthfall


EARTHFALL (2015)


Starring Joe Lando, Michelle Stafford, Denyse Tontz, Diana Hopper, Pressly Coker, Raffaello Degruttola, Jeff Doucette, Evan Gamble, Ben Levin, Brendan McCarthy, Andrew Elvis Miller, Perry Laylon Ojeda, Henderson Wade, Ben Gavin and Lou Ferrigno, Jr.


Screenplay by Colin Reese.


Directed by Steven Daniels.


Distributed by Anchor Bay Home Video.  89 minutes.  Not Rated.


You know a film is kind of bottom of the barrel when it’s lead star is some dude from Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman.  You figure that if Joe Lando had done anything worth mentioning in the 17 years since that series went off the air, they would not have to use that old title as his “you-know-him-from” credit.  Of course, compared to his co-stars, Dr. Quinn is a huge credit – the other leads come from the likes of The Young & the Restless, General Hospital and a supporting actor from The Shawshank Redemption.


So right away, you know that this post-apocalyptic thriller is not exactly going to be blockbuster.  However, not all films are necessarily going to have a star-studded mega-cast.  Earthfall is lean and mean b-filmmaking, not exactly good, but with a certain amount of attitude to match its miniscule budget.  Actually, comparatively the special effects aren’t all that bad, though there is a rather limited use of them.


Earthfall of shows you what a Roland (2012, The Day After) Emmerich film would look like if he had a budget of about $20,000 and a cast of about 10.


The story is pretty simple, or one might say simplistic.  The earth has been caught in a huge meteor shower – much like the one that killed all the dinosaurs – been knocked on its side (north and south are now east and west) and been pulled out of orbit in the solar system.  This causes massive meteors coming down on Earth, as well as lots of oddball weather explosions.


The main characters of the film are pretty much one family.  Steve (Lando) is an author who is having trouble finishing his latest book – little does he know how unimportant that manuscript is soon to become.


His wife Nancy (Stafford) is a scientist who is away working at some weird covert NASA kind of agency.  She was apparently so far away that she couldn’t come home for Thanksgiving, but so close by that she can drive home in a matter of hours after the apocalypse.


Daughter Rachel (Tontz) is going to an outdoor rock festival with some friends (though there seem to be no other festival goers anywhere nearby.)


When the end comes, Steve is determined that despite the odds he has to find both his wife and daughter.  It seems like a handful of people have survived this apocalypse, but hey, his wife and daughter are the only people on Earth that matter to him.


He and a friend who also survived named Tony (Degruttola) get into Tony’s van and hit the road in search of Steve’s family.  Tony is mostly there for comic relief – the dude is kind of drug-addled, but honestly Steve is a real dick to him, particularly since he is the one friend Steve has who is still alive.


They drive through a surprisingly serene wasteland – they only see one dead body and while there is lots of damage, none of it seems “end of the world” serious.  In fact, they mostly just seem to be in the deserts.  They survive a whole set of slightly less than fascinating adventures, including aftershocks, roving killers and of course a big government conspiracy.


In the meantime, the wife and daughter are also some of the handful of survivors and as irrationally sure that their family are the only survivors.


Earthfall is a pretty bad film, but for what it is it could have been even worse.


Dave Strohler


Copyright ©2015 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: October 13, 2015.

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