Riddled with plot holes, dumb logic, drastically generic action, and a cast of characters that could come from about any other movie, Meltdown fits right into the definition of B-movie. It’s concept has been lifted from other films, most notably 1961’s Day the Earth Caught Fire, and the performances range from sub par to abysmal. There’s barely any disaster to consider this a disaster movie too. It’s an illogical mess.

An experiment goes wrong as scientists attempt to blow up an asteroid heading full speed at our planet. When this fails miserably, the asteroid scrapes the Earth, and no one seems to notice the continent-crossing fireball it leaves behind. This near collision shifts the Earth’s orbit, pushing it closer to the sun.

When the temperature hits 140 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s logical that the human body will need some cover. As Casper Van Dien and his family (with loads of emotional baggage being drug behind) make their way across, well, wherever they’re from, they load themselves up with clothes. This is logical in direct sunlight. Once into a sewer system in which no light is coming through and people begin passing out while wearing multiple layers of clothing, it’s hard to feel bad for them. That’s simply sloppy, uncaring filmmaking.

Much of the chaos is handled through stock footage. Power outages seem to be affecting all but the main characters, looting only plays a small role, and the massive fires somehow avoid Van Dien’s crew. Some long distance computer generated shots of a city burning are the closest things to destruction in Meltdown. Amazingly, even with dead bodies everywhere and a climbing temperature, the characters barely even break a sweat.

Their quest to arrive at a small airport and escape to the Arctic seems pointless in the sense of the disaster. Their struggle to survive feels small as the entire planet begins to cook. A few small gunfights fail to add to the drama. You feel as if someone else out there is doing something far more exciting or important.

The family drama, riddled with cheesy, predictable dialogue, stops the film cold. Van Dien has a daughter, and her boyfriend is an ex-con. Even after her boyfriend saves her life multiple times, they still can’t seem to see eye to eye. A broken relationship goes nowhere in the end.

With a final resolution even more implausible than the initial problem, Meltdown doesn’t end well either. It’s generic, though sadly it can’t even live up to the typical, predictable disaster movie formula that can still be enjoyable. Stay out of the heat.

Matt Paprocki is the reviews editor for Digital Press, a classic video game website which he called home after his fanzine (Gaming Source) published its final issue. The deep game collection which spans nearly 30 systems and 2,000 games line his walls for reasearch purposes. Really. He has also begun writing freelance for the Toledo Free Press.

When I first read an American DVD company was working on bringing the original Godzilla and its sequels to disc in both their original Japanese and American versions, I began to wonder how much the later Godzilla flicks' fondly remembered goofiness would translate back in their original language. We all know that the original 1954 Gojira was a fairly grim nuclear age monster rampage film in both its Japanese and American form – but as the series "progressed" into the sixties and seventies, the Americanized Godzillas turned into Saturday afternoon kid's TV fodder.

Having seen a slew of these ill-synced flicks in my wasted youth, I was curious as to how they'd work without dubbing or the rough handling so many of them received when they first arrived in the U.S. (case in point: first sequel Godzilla Raids Again, which was even re-titled Gigantis the Fire Monster on its first American release because new distributor Warner Bros. didn't want to pay for the Godzilla brand name). With the upcoming release of two new entries in Classic Media's "Toho Master Collection," Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964) and Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965), I had the chance to see just how wacky these rascals are in their original un-Americanized versions.

Let's take a look at Ghidorah today (and save Astro-Monster, which was originally released in the U.S.A. as Monster Zero, for another time). Ghidorah contains the first instance of what would quickly become a familiar Toho plot: wherein Godzilla and two of the studio's other heavy-duty rampagers – Rodan and Mothra – team up to best an invading monster. The alien menace, Ghidorah (full name, "King Ghidorah"), is like an amalgamation of his opponents: a three-headed dragon with two tails, he has wings to blow the roofs off pagodas a lá Rodan or Mothra, but can also indulge in Godzilla-styled stompitude. Where the Big G. breathes radioactive fire whenever he's really being pissy, Ghidorah shoots out electric whatsit beams from his three mouths. No wonder it takes all three of our home-grown creatures to whup his two tails.

The title beastie doesn't really show for two-thirds of the movie, so to pass the time, we're given a plot around a visiting Princess (Akiko Wakabayashi, a Bond Girl in You Only Live Twice) whose body is taken over by a survivor of Ghidorah's invasion of the planet Venus 5,000 years earlier. (Why'd the monster wait so long between invasions? A long hibernation, perhaps?) Said Princess is the survivor of an airborne plane explosion plotted by nefarious spies from her homeland of Segina, so when she unexpectedly appears unharmed on Japanese soil, spouting prophecies and chirpily telling folks, "I'm from Venus," the sunglass-wearing bad guys try to hunt her down. On the side of the angels are a brother cop and sister reporter, the usual obligatory nerdy professor, plus the twin fairy sisters (Eimi and Yûmi Ito, a.k.a. musical duo the Peanuts) from Mothra's home island, who get to do full renditions of the big bug's summoning tune, "Call Happiness," twice in the movie.

As Ghidorah opens, our gal reporter Naoko (Yuriko Hoshi) is interviewing a crew of scientists observing a sudden rash of shooting stars that are dropping onto the planet during an unusually warm winter (we know what season it is because two of the exposition-happy characters tell us this fact); elsewhere, her police detective brother (Yosuke Natsuki) has been given the assignment to bodyguard the visiting Princess Salno, but before he begins said assignment, he receives word that the princess' plane was destroyed mid-flight. When a mysterious prophetess appears at Mt. Aso, the site where the flying monster Rodan was reportedly killed in his first movie appearance, sharp-eyed Detective Shindo recognizes her royal corporeal form.

Our Venusian-controlled princess has shown up at the volcano just in time to warn scoffing tourists of Rodan's imminent resurrection, then later does the same at Yokohama to be equally unheeded by the passengers and crew of a ship that'll get demolished by Godzilla. (As a kid watching the earliest Godzillas on television, I thought the scenes where Gojira rises from the sea, water cascading from all sides of him, were the scariest moments in these pictures.) Godzilla and Rodan meet and commence fighting – a preliminary match before the title antagonist makes his appearance – until one of the mysterious shooting stars "hatches" and out pops King Ghidorah.

The two dueling beasties don't immediately take after the invading alien, however. For that to occur, Mothra has to be summoned from her island to recruit both Godzilla and Rodan to take on the fight. The scene where young Mothra, still in giant caterpillar form, interrupts the duo's fight by spraying cocoon strands on 'em is pretty funny, but the follow-up where the good bug tries to persuade the two to take on Ghidorah and save humanity is a comic high point. As the fairy sisters obligingly translate for us ("Godzilla is saying he has no reason to protect the humans. 'They're always bullying me …'"), the two monsters are initially unresponsive to Mothra's entreaties. "Men are not the only stubborn creatures," one of our hapless human protagonists notes. But, happily, the big three-on-one battle finally takes place. Like any good reluctant movie hero – from Rick Blaine to Snake Plissken – you can count on Godzilla and Rodan to ultimately do the right thing.

The movie's special effects, courtesy of Toho main man Eiji Tsuburaya (also responsible for Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra's first appearances), are exactly what you'd expect: men in bulky monster suits tromping around a landscape of easily demolished warehouses and electric power lines. (At one point, the berserk beasts accidentally save the Princess from being electrocuted when Rodan drops Godzilla belly first onto a big electric tower.) On their own endearingly clunky terms, the effects largely work – though a couple of times when Mothra chomps down on one of Ghidorah's tails, you can see the strings, while a shot showing two puppets of the monsters off in the distance looks jerkier than it should. Classic Media, on the packaging for Astro-Monster, calls the effects "retro-riffic," which is basically adspeak for "cheesy."

As for the question of whether subtitles add to or detract from the movie's quintessential ridiculousness, I'm happy to report that the original movie's Silliness Quotient still remains enjoyably high. In one of my favorite moments, the movie attempts to explain how Princess Salno escaped that exploding airplane by bringing on a "UFO Expert" to nonsensically babble about the existence of other dimensions alongside ours. The way the scene is shot and lit, it looks like one of Charles Gray's earnestly pontificating moments from Rocky Horror Picture Show. Whether in its native tongue or dubbed into Yankee Blather, a movie moment like this remains eternal.

When I saw the first advertisements for Knocked Up, I could not have been less intrigued. After all, the "unprepared couple bumbles their way through pregnancy" plot is as old as the hills, and I doubted very much that director/writer Judd Apatow would be able to bring a fresh perspective to the table.

Apatow, for those not familiar with him, has produced some of the biggest hit comedies of the last five years, including Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and The 40 Year-Old Virgin. But while those movies were essentially really long sketches that relied on star power (Will Ferrell and Steve Carell) and liberal amounts of raunch for their success, Knocked Up is a much more assured and satisfying film.

For those who have seen Nine Months or any movie like it, Knocked Up will feel familiar – Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) and Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl) hook up for a rather implausible one-night stand, which leads to a bun in the oven for Alison. There's fear at first, followed by some ham-handed attempts to make things work. Inevitably, Ben is confronted by his inadequacies as a father-to-be, and is pushed away by Alison so he can get his act together. He returns a changed man, and there is much rejoicing.

While the story is hardly groundbreaking, Apatow maximizes Knocked Up's potential by minimizing the amount of clichés normally found with movies like this. There's no fainting men in the delivery room, no awkward attempt to build a crib, and no lame jokes about how weird Lamaze class is.

Knocked Up also features some very genuine explorations of relationships and happiness. The two main couples in the movie are more characters than caricatures, although Ben's pot-smoking buddies are nothing more than comedic cannon fodder (albeit good ones). There are also a ton of pop culture references, which to me are better than most sex scenes. Any movie that contains a discussion about the merits of Steely Dan wins instant points with me.

But what elevated Knocked Up above most recent comedies are some fine comedic performances by Rogen and Heigl, as well as by Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, and Jason Segel. Saturday Night Live's Kristen Wiig gets very little screen time as Alison Scott's rival at the E! Network, but makes the most of it with a brilliantly subtle performance.

To be certain, this movie most definitely earns its ‘R’ rating with healthy doses of profanity and drug humor. But for the most part, the language feels a lot more organic than, say, The 40 Year-Old Virgin. The only scene that stood out as gratuitous took place in the delivery room, and transported me right back to high school health class. I'll just leave it at that.

In a movie landscape dominated by mega-blockbusters like Shrek 3, Spider-Man 3, and Pirates of the Caribbean 3 (hey, notice a trend?), Knocked Up is a welcome respite. It hopefully also is a sign of things to come from Apatow, who has now proven that he can turn a pedestrian story into an entertaining movie. I look forward to seeing what he can do with more original material.