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  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Lady in Red bar girl Marsha has little dialogue or plot relevance, but is better remembered than several of the main or secondary characters.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: This movie about a deadly volcanic eruption where numerous people die came out on March 28th, 1980. Not even two months later on May 18th, Mount St. Helens erupted in the state of Washington in the biggest explosion ever seen in the history of the United States, killing 57 people and causing billions of dollars in damage. Even more so, this movie actually came out only a couple of weeks after Mount St. Helens started showing volcanic activity.
  • Heartwarming Moments: Conti pushing Fendly out of the way of a fireball and getting set alight and temporarily blinded for his trouble. Fendly wastes no time in putting him out and is genuinely concerned for Conti’s safety afterward. He’s visibly relieved to hear that the burns are superficial and Conti will recover, and winds up acting as his eyes for the rest of the film.
  • Narm: Most of the movie is deliriously over-the-top, cheesy, and fake-looking, to the point where even the movie's video release trailer made fun of it. When NBC aired it in 1989 (under the title of Earth's Final Fury), their promos took a similar tone.
  • Padding: The infamous bridge sequence, which has been called the worst sequence in a disaster movie ever because it consists of people very slowly crossing a bridge for over twenty minutes. Granted, there's lots of lava explosions, wood falling down, and Pat Morita's hilarious death, but it's still twenty minutes of people crossing a bridge.
  • Retroactive Recognition: Who is that playing Tony's cockfighting rival? Why it's Mr. Miyagi!
  • Special Effect Failure:
    • The footage of people falling to their doom throughout the film are shoddy enough with the dodgy bluescreen effects, but the first instance of it has the person looking like they're being pulled in at a 40-degree angle.
    • The effect for the destruction of the hotel is literally just footage of an explosion laid on top of a still image.
  • Values Dissonance: Shelby's Dogged Nice Guy repeated marriage proposals toward Kay, his explicitly uninterested secretary, have not aged well, although fortunately it never does develop into any physical sexual assault.
  • The Woobie: Nikki is one of the nicest and best-adjusted people at the resort, but after barely surviving a traumatic fate during the tsunami, she is told by her godfather that her husband is an unloving Gold Digger, stays behind to risk death by lava just to be with her husband anyway, then finds out he is indeed cheating on her, with him unsympathetically mocking her, leaving Nikki to spend the last act in a state of uninterrupted loneliness and terror.

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