Very few of The Asylum's movies are good at all, let alone great, being poorly made, badly written and acted and far too derivative.
There is always something fascinating however about their badness, their best efforts are reasonably entertaining but rarely rise above mediocre but at their worst their movies are intelligence-insulting and an assault on the senses.
While this reviewer has not seen the movie 'San Andreas Quake' is ripped off of, 'San Andreas', it really does have to be really bad to be worse than this . From understanding that movie has mixed reviews, whereas 'San Andreas Quake' has been almost universally panned in the IMDb reviews. While 'San Andreas Quake' is not quite among the Asylum's very worst, it is one of their worst recent efforts.
To say that 'San Andreas Quake' is poorly made is an understatement, if anything it is one of the cheapest-looking movies personally seen in some time. Hard to say which is worse. The drab-in-colour production design; the cheap and far too simplistic sets and scenery, looking almost dead in fact; the less-than-smooth photography; the bacon-slicer-like choppy editing, or the CGI, which is not only of horrendous quality (even films from the 70s would have rejected them) but also either appear out of nowhere or have no reason for being in that scene. The music is often intrusive, has little pace, over- scored and too often just doesn't fit with what's going on, it tries to bring energy to scenes that are in desperate need for it but it doesn't in any way gel.
'San Andreas Quake' is incredibly poorly scripted, with line after line of clunky, sometimes childish dialogue and even more stilted line delivery, and the audience is assaulted even more with disaster / scientific jargon that's little more than incoherent gibberish (it was like the writers didn't have a clue what they were writing, if that was indeed the case the viewers do not have a hope, Jhey Castles has the worst of it), sometimes misplaced and irritating comedic parts and cloying sentimentality. The story is far too simple for its own good, doesn't even try to do anything original or surprising with the genre or premise, and drags as a result (especially in the sentimental scenes, that drag so much and are so sickly sweet it's enough to make one throw up quite violently), also displaying no energy, suspense or fun and throughout 'San Andreas Quake' lacks real panic and danger. The very few times it tries to explain anything, it always comes across as implausible and underdeveloped.
Every bit as bad are the characters and how they are written. There is nothing interesting or relatable about them. If anything they are as one-dimensional as one could possibly get and big, obnoxious stereotypes. If you had a list of every cliché in the book with characters, their situations and what happens in the story and ticking off every cliché that appears the list by the end of the movie is guaranteed to have ticks on every or almost every cliché listed. The direction is flat and shows no competence, the action/disaster sequences should be exciting but are too sparsely populated and dizzyingly shot and edited, if any sense of destruction was intended it doesn't in any way show here and it focuses too much on the aftermath rather than actual destruction itself. The acting is throughout poor at best, sure it is hard to do anything with such a bad script but the cast could at least have tried. Grace Van Dien grates on the nerves and Lane Townsend couldn't have been any more bland, while Jhey Castles looks like she doesn't understand a word of her dialogue hence the complete lack of conviction.
Overall, 'San Andreas Quake' is a train wreck, and for a disaster movie the only disaster really is how appallingly executed the whole thing is. 1/10, and that is being generous. Bethany Cox
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