What did the mother volcano say to the baby volcano? “I lava you!” Well, I thought it was funny. But for my older boy, vulcanism is no joking matter and lava is the stuff of nightmares. James is both obsessed with volcanoes and terrified by them. Naturally this meant we had to go and see the Volcano Show, one of Reykjavik’s more eccentric attractions.
It’s run by a very droll fellow named Villi Knudsen, who shows films of his volcano-filming expeditions in order to raise money to make more expeditions to film volcanoes. We crowded into his tiny, home-made theatre along with dozens of other tourists. Mr Knudsen himself manned the ticket booth. There are multiple showings of two films in various languages, all day long, and you can buy videos and DVDs of the films. By my rough calculations, he must be absolutely coining it.
As we waited for the show to start, James was both excited and terribly nervous. He kept glancing at the exit. Toby took the cosy darkness as a cue to nurse, but as soon as the film started he was transfixed, watching with one eye and gesturing with his free hand. Ten minutes in, he was upright on my lap, pointing out all the cars, planes and helicopters and amplifying the soundtrack with his own explosion noises. His running commentary -- “Hot! Hot! Boom! Wow! Hot!” -- culminated in a very loud “Uh-oh!” when the houses on Heimaey fell victim to a giant red-hot lava flow.
Big brother, by that point, was gripping my arm and urgently whispering “We have to leave the movie theatre NOW and Iceland TOMORROW after one more visit to the Family Fun Park!” “Don’t worry,” I reassured him, “they have plenty of notice about these things.” Right on cue, the voiceover chimed in: “In 1973, an unexpected eruption…”
To grown-up eyes, the film was both a labour of love and a bit of a mish-mash. Whipping forwards and backwards in time, it was full of ponderous set-ups, ominous yet unfulfilled foreshadowings, and a vast number of near misses and anti-climaxes - "There was to be no eruption that day" - redeemed by the occasional explosive money-shot, all fire and ice. I am glad nobody died in the Heimaey eruption; it was by far the visual highlight of the film.
But the utterly deadpan narration, by Knudsen himself, added a welcome satirical edge to the less eventful stretches. As a group of avid volcano-stalkers trudged up a snowy hill, for example, the voiceover intoned mournfully “It was the kind of journey that seemed exciting only long afterwards.”
I think the film worked that way for James, too. By the end, Toby had advanced to the front row and was standing mere feet from the screen and gesticulating in admiration, while James still clung to me, hiding his eyes. But when the narration mentioned that the whole of Iceland was formed volcanically, he sprang to life: “You mean we’re sitting on a seat, in a building, on top of cold lava? That’s AMAZING! Isn’t that AMAZING??”
Aha, a breakthrough! Hot lava, bad. Cold and exceedingly ancient lava, amazing.
Mr Knudsen seemed a genial sort, with the air of a vaguely preoccupied whirlwind and the heart of a genuine amateur. He loves what he does, and he has been doing it since boyhood, when he accompanied his late father on eruption-spotting expeditions. Tall, bearded, and gingery, he dashed between the projection room, the front desk, and the sacred editing suite where he was no doubt splicing together more footage of volcano stake-outs. He did pause, briefly, to answer the question that James had been burning to ask.
“So, um, how close did you get to the lava?”
“Very,” was the laconic reply.
“Very?!” repeated James, both awed and dubious.
“Very... close.”
That seemed to satisfy my ambivalent little thrill-seeker.
Our review in a nutshell? The Volcano Show took care of a rainy afternoon, and satisfied our diverse genre requirements: action, horror, documentary, and comedy. Two tiny thumbs way up, two bigger hands clapped firmly over eyes, and one very large maternal grain of salt.