So-called “mockbusters” are part and parcel of the low-rent movie business, with a raft of thinly-veiled imitators being spewed out as quickly as possible on a budget as small as possible in order to cash in on a hot title. Either that, or Attack of the Meth Gator really was just a coincidence, but Destruction: Los Angeles couldn’t even decide which unsuccessful disaster epic it wanted to plagiarize.
Based entirely on the title, you’d have thought it was attempting to ride the coattails of Battle: Los Angeles, the thoroughly mediocre sci-fi war story that drew a shrug from critics before failing to perform well enough at the box office to justify a sequel. Then again, the plot is entirely reminiscent of Dwayne Johnson’s San Andreas, which also has a follow-up stuck in development hell.
The “twist” is that it’s a volcano causing chaos this time, with an eruption near LA causing fiery devastation and then a catastrophic earthquake. With rain of both the standard and magma-based variety tearing the city to shreds, a journalist decides that the best course of action is to run headlong into the maelstrom for the story of a lifetime.
That’s right; there’s even a soupcon of Roland Emmerich’s 2012 thrown into the melting pot for good measure, with director Tibor Takács happy to leave originality at the door in favor of running through a Greatest Hits compilation instead. Unsurprisingly, the results were not good, but that hasn’t stopped Destruction: Los Angeles from stirring up a natural disaster on streaming.
Per FlixPatrol, the copycat caper has ended up as one of the most-watched features on the iTunes global charts this week, because apparently the real things must be unavailable.
