IT LAVAS L.A.

By RICHARD CORLISS

Just one more reason not to live in Los Angeles. It seems there's an active volcano under Wilshire Boulevard, and is it steamed! It blows spitballs of lava up through manhole covers. It sends fire chunks into the sky, as if in a malefic Disney World spectacle, and has them land on prime Beverly Hills real estate. It not only exhales scalding air, it also sucks it back in. This monster, writhing undead in its coffin, has a personality. It even growls, basso profundo; imagine Barry White slowly murmuring "Booo!"

We're pretty sure that Nostradamus predicted a premillennial Hollywood plague of natural-disaster movies. Last year Twister; this fall The Flood. In February, Dante's Peak sent small-town folk scurrying from their local Vesuvius; now Mick Jackson's Volcano has man tamper in God's domain--by daring to build a subway in L.A. The script, by Jerome Armstrong and Billy Ray, thus exploits two major fears of Angelenos: getting demolished by a horrid subterranean force, and having to take public transportation.

The gookum-like lava is less smothering than the plot cliches: our hero (Tommy Lee Jones) and his perpetually hysterical child (Gaby Hoffmann), ever blundering into catastrophe; the spiky geologist (Anne Heche) who has to exclaim "Oh, God!" 46 times; silliest of all, the ornery whites and blacks who when covered with gray ash learn that, gee, Armageddon is color-blind. And just once in a disaster film, could a dog please die?

All right, nobody cares. You just want to see the volcano that ate L.A. If so, you'll have a hell-lava time.

--By Richard Corliss