This recap is dedicated to Brittany Murphy, the latest celebrity to prove that the best way to get people to glorify your talent is to drop dead. Dying young is arguably Brittany Murphy’s best career move ever, but we are talking about a career full of choices such as “I really must do a romantic comedy opposite Ashton Kutcher.”

I don’t have anything against Brittany Murphy, but it’s hard to say she really did anything of note since circa 2005, which is no big secret. SNL even parodied this two weeks before her death, where featured performer Abby Elliott played a dazed and addled Murphy who thought she was there to host the show, and then proceeded to introduce Blink 182. Blink 182 being another act that hasn’t done much since circa 2005. The guys in Blink 182 didn’t die young, but at least their drummer gave it one hell of a shot.

Now that she’s dead, Brittany will surely be hailed as one of the finest actresses of her generation. But before her death, she was just one of a thousand former “it” girls who seemed like the next big thing, but then quickly faded from the public eye (anybody heard from Julia Stiles lately?). Well, that’s not entirely true. It seems Brittany fell on much harder times than most ex-starlets of her day. She ended up making an original film for SyFy. It doesn’t get much worse than that.

Actually, it gets much worse than that. MegaFault was produced by the Asylum, a cheapo movie studio specializing in direct-to-video knockoffs of big budget blockbusters. The Asylum’s output includes Transmorphers, The Terminators, I Am Omega, The Da Vinci Treasure, and Snakes on a Train. Yes, Snakes on a Plane, a film that was itself little more than a SyFy original in the first place, got a cheapo knockoff thanks to the folks at the Asylum.

But never let it be said that the Asylum doesn’t release a broad slate of movies. They don’t just blatantly rip off big budget films; they also come up with films that sort of seem like knockoffs but aren’t, like Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus and Dragonquest, as well as movies that rip off TV miniseries, such as our current subject MegaFault, which is sort of like 10.5 with bits of 2012 and The Core tossed in, and all of it done for around $700. It’s possible the crew was paid entirely in Chuck E. Cheese tokens.

Brittany Murphy plays a renowned seismologist here, and comes off about as credible as, well, Brittany Murphy playing a renowned seismologist. Get ready for a depressing set of screencaps in this recap, because Murphy looks (and sounds) terrible throughout. I can’t tell if her total lack of energy is due to her health issues, or her just plain hating the material.

Joining Brittany Murphy to bury his career is Eriq LaSalle, who was a regular cast member on ER for eight seasons. In every scene he’s in, you can just feel LaSalle’s utter disbelief that it has actually come to this. So, obviously, he phones it in, too.

Also onboard is character actor-slash-TV journeyman Bruce Davison, who flirted with A or B-list fame when he appeared in X-Men. But it’s pretty hard to say this movie is much of a comedown for him, since he’s been taking these kinds of roles for as long as he’s been in the business.

Rounding out our cast of has-beens and never-wases is Justin Hartley, now a regular cast member on Smallville, playing Ollie Queen/Green Arrow. You might recall that he scored the part of Green Arrow after his Aquaman spin-off wasn’t picked up by the CW. And say what you will about Justin’s acting abilities, but he appears to be the only “name” in this cast who’s actually putting forth any effort.

And that’s about it for the actors in MegaFault you might have heard of. Once you get past Justin, it’s straight down into the land of people who are just thankful to be getting their SAG cards.

We start things off, according to the caption, at “Black River Mountain, West Virginia”. The caption also says it’s 8:23 AM, and in fact all the captions in the film will be telling us the current time, but it never becomes important, so I’m not going to bother keeping track.

Here we find Eriq LaSalle as “Boomer”, a guy who runs his own demolition business, and he’s out in the remote desert with his crew. They’re doing some sort of controlled demolition work. Boomer yells, “Fire in the hole!” and then pushes a detonator, setting off a series of cheap CGI explosions all along a nearby CGI mountain range.

He surveys the landscape. It appears the explosives did their jobs. But then he notices his truck is shaking, and he frantically gets on his walkie-talkie to tell his men to evacuate. Of course, they’re too dense to understand what he’s screaming about, and they also don’t see huge, fake, CGI cracks forming in the ground, coming right for them. Hilariously, several of Boomer’s men are swallowed up by a big CGI crack.

The effects in this movie are, to put it mildly, an abomination. They look like they were created on an Etch-a-Sketch. Every time a CGI crack opens up in this movie, an angel gets punched in the face.

So Boomer jumps in his truck to outrun the CGI crack. And when I say “outrun”, I mean it. He’s keeping just ahead of a giant crack the whole time. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the crack was actually chasing him. Unfortunately, his truck stalls, and a big crater forms around him, and Boomer’s truck gets swallowed up whole.

Now we’re in Washington D.C., which is skillfully conveyed via postcard snapshots of D.C., and of course, another caption.

Cut to a meeting of the “United States Geophysics Union”, where Dr. Amy Lane, eminent seismologist, is about to give a speech. And holy crap, Brittany Murphy looks terrible. Her eyes are all sunken in. Her lips are ridiculously bloated. Her hair is the same color as her skin, and her skin is the same color as her eyes. She looks embalmed. I don’t know if I can even stand to look at her for the duration of this movie.

Amy is being introduced by Bruce Davison, playing Dr. Mark Rhodes. Rhodes is apparently a former mentor of Amy’s, and they have a history dating back to the Northridge earthquake of 1994. Blah blah blah, Amy works for FEMA now, she’s a “tireless advocate for earthquake preparedness”, and so on. She’s here with her husband, played by Justin Hartley, and also her young daughter.

Before Amy gets up to speak, she winks at her daughter, though maybe that was just a twitch. Brittany is really twitchy in this movie.

Amy gives an anvilicious speech about how the world is “unstable”, and says that soon they’ll have the technology to predict earthquakes, and also to “stop earthquakes from inflicting so much danger and devastation to people.” Uh, say again? Devastation, I can understand, but is it possible to “inflict danger” “to” people?

Suddenly, there’s a rumbling, and Amy’s family already knows the drill, and they dive under their table. The rumbling passes, and everyone in the banquet hall has a good chuckle at them for overreacting. Yeah, what a bunch of losers, getting all freaked out by an earthquake in a city that hasn’t experienced one since like 1897. Then there’s a weird lull, where everyone just stares into space for a few seconds, and then the rumbling returns with a vengeance.

Amy yells at everyone to stay inside and get under their tables. She then continues to stand there at the podium, telling everyone to watch out for things falling on them, and the whole time, she’s standing right in front of big plate glass windows. No surprise, the windows all shatter. You know, I think maybe I’ll take my earthquake preparedness tips from someone who knows not to stand in front of plate glass windows during an actual quake. Of course, the shattering glass is all CGI, followed by a clip of a stage hand dumping bits of glass onto Bruce Davison.

There’s panic and mayhem outside. A fake CGI crater opens up at an intersection and a car falls inside. A pedestrian bridge, also completely CGI, breaks off from a building and crashes to the pavement. And then for the coup de grace, we flash over to the Washington Monument, which explodes in a cloud of fiery CGI dust. Wow. What do they keep inside the Washington Monument, anyway? Does the military stockpile explosives in there?

Outside the banquet hall, there’s a threadbare contingent of fire trucks and ambulances, and maybe a dozen people wandering around. Amy is on her cell phone, getting information about the quake, and asking vitally important questions like, “What’s the seismic table in that area? The seismic table is what?”

She tells Dr. Rhodes that there’s been a magnitude 7 quake and the epicenter is in “Boone County, Virginia”. Actually, Boone County is in West Virginia, but close enough, right? Actually, I’m pretty sure the filmmakers can say whatever they want about West Virginia in this movie, because nobody there owns a DVD player.

Already, Justin is playing your typical neglected spouse. It appears earthquakes are what Amy lives for, and this is just one of many occasions where she’s ditched her husband and daughter to go off and investigate a quake. As always in disaster movies, there is no job so trivial that a character can’t get obsessed with it to the point of neglecting his or her family.

Dr. Rhodes arranges for Justin and daughter to catch a military cargo plane back to Denver, and Amy apologizes to her daughter, saying, “I’m sorry I didn’t get to take you to the Washington Monument!” And now, you never will. Thanks for reminding her.