Volcano is a very famous movie because it happened to come out two months after Dante's Peak, which was also about a volcano but which, lucky for the makers of Volcano, hadn't used the word "volcano" in its title. A similar phenomenon happened the next year, when Deep Impact and Armageddon were released, both about giant space objects hurtling toward Earth. And it happened again in 2001, when you had the two films about grotesque swamp monsters, Shrek and Bridget Jones's Diary.

Volcano begins…