The new stop-motion feature film Disaster! does to Armageddon and Twister what Airplane! did to the Airport films of the 1970s. Finally available on DVD, the adult-oriented comedy tempers some genius satire with crude potty humor to provide a fun ride that gives the latest generation of disaster pics a long-overdue kick in the asteroid.
Directed by Roy Wood (Celebrity Deathmatch), Disaster! employs puppets made with a combination of clay and silicone over wire-armatures to spoof big-budget, apocalyptic Hollywood blockbusters. As a giant planetoid hurdles toward Earth, vulcanoligist Harry Bottoms is enlisted by the government to assemble a team to go into space and eliminate the threat. Joined by his estranged daughter, Sandy Mellons, Bottoms must save the day with the help of specialists V.D. Johnson, Hanukah Jonze and Donkey Dixon. Members of the rock band Motley Crue also lend their voices and likenesses to the pic.
Disaster! was written by Paul Benson (X-Men Unlimited) and Matt Sullivan (The God and Devil Show), who shopped the script around Hollywood for years but found producers concerned about the amount of money it would take to make it in live-action. Dream Ent. president Yitzhak Ginsberg and former Dream Ent. CEO Ehud Bleiberg then go hold of it and decided to self-finance the project, choosing to do it with animation. They got Wood on board after looking at his reel and he assembled a small, talented team of animators and artists who previously worked on Celebrity Deathmatch and pushed puppets for New Line Cinema’s Elf and Will Vinton productions such as The P.J.s and Gary & Mike.
Digital effects were used sparing in the film, which features over-sexed astronauts, a drooling, wheelchair-bound physicist, a token gay robot, a man-eating space ape and a flatulent Frenchman who mans a space station shaped like a giant wheel of cheese. The DVD also features several unrated shorts. More information and animated clips from Disaster! can be found at www.disasterthemovie.com.
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