Eissturm aus dem All

Everybody kept saying they was freezing but didn't bother to pull their hood over their heads. The girl constant screaming was very so annoying. The flash freeze froze some people to ice and skipped the rest as if they wasn't there, just get up and walk away. Wasn't much thought written into this movie.

Aside for a selective few, like the recent Everest, disaster movies don't really have amazing track record. So, one would already expect what to come from the poster or title here. Christmas Icetastrophe works by incorporating cheap CGI and shots where people stand very still to create the illusion of being frozen. It's as silly as it sounds and even worse when one finds out that the trigger is meteor fall.

As common sense, or countless depictions of Hollywood, would dictate, a meteor usually falls down to Earth in blazing glory. For this movie however, it will create instant ice age to wherever it touches. Scientific reasoning be damned, yet it still tries to convince audience with pseudoscience mumbo-jumbo, which undoubtedly be a great pivotal point for the plot.

Cast is all sort of cliché. You have the heroic father, the one scientist who figures things out, the douchebag who may or may not redeem himself, incompetent authority figure, a few sidekicks for brief comedy and half of the town for death scenes. Everything plays out in dramatically predictable way.

The effect itself is far from convincing, most of them literally a blue filter being applied to create cold effect. There are many scenes where people instantly freeze over in ludicrous fashion. It does tend to repeat this tricks many times over, it becomes stale and not even hammy funny at the end.

Being B-movie doesn't exemplified the lack of quality but for a movie called Christmas Icetastrophe, it delivers what expected of it, with the conviction and thrill of random employee forced to work at holiday.

Is it incredibly stupid? Yes, and to its credit it knows it. Though we start in a university, any science accuracy is soon disregarded, for the bettter i think, it wouldnt have been half as fun if it had tried for seriousness or listened to science, no it is sdumb sure but like a knights tale, choosing to run on rule of cool, adding a bit of plot armor to its protagonists as they defy science magic and everything in between.

It also has a familiar cast if you watch canadian-filmed scifi which adds to the enjoyment in mt opinion.

I particularly enjoyed the line 'it isnt magic it is science' when the movie completely ignores science for the other 99.9% of the film.

And i must say i appreciate the lack of forced romance that is so damn common otherwise.

In a nutshell.....asteroid hits town starting to celebrate Christmas, Santa gets flash frozen, people scream, people flee and good looking lead actor and actress save town just before everyone is flash frozen.

Too bad Mystery Science Theater is not still on TV, because this movie is perfect for it. There is no story line, no character development, no acting of note, no anything other than wall-to-wall things/people being flash frozen. There is not even a point to who is/isn't flash frozen. But trying to find something positive to say, it does have a lot of actors who were in other shows/movies that were much better.

Its just a classically bad sci-fi movie and the kind of movie for people who are into such things.

Icetastrophe is not a completely unwatchable movie and SyFy have done worse, it is a better movie (if only marginally) than their previous seasonal offering the 12 Disasters of Christmas.

The movie does contain a few things that make it a little better than it could have been. A couple of the death scenes are cool, once you don't mind that they're not particularly inventive, and do have a little fun and suspense. Some of the scenery is reasonably attractive too, looking much more than basement or abandoned allotment quality, and there is the use of some nice seasonal songs that fit well (there should have been more though).

However, apart from the scenery the production values for Icetastrophe are poorly done, it's shot rather drearily, is drably lit and while there are worse special effects in SyFy movies they still look laughably fake (including ones that look like giant penises). The direction mostly ranges from flat to incompetent, only coming to life in some of the deaths. When the seasonal songs are not used, the movie is scored in an unappealingly loud monotonous drone, with muddied sound quality. The script is incredibly poor, with forced humour (mostly unintentional), tedious ham-fisted melodrama that bogs the movie down rather than adding anything and dialogue that often sounds like gibberish.

Very little compelling about the story either, as well as being as thin as ice it takes stupidity to extremes (even for science fiction, the science is as far away from believable as you can possibly go), continuity errors are so sloppy that you could have sworn there wasn't any and it suffers from a large lack of tension, fun or suspense (albeit with the odd moment) as a result of sluggish pacing and the overload of stupidity, my tolerance for silliness and stupidity is high but this was to the extent that it was impossible to take at face value or enjoy. The characters have no development to them and are devoid of personality too, while the acting is the usual messy mix of over-acting and blandness.

Overall, not completely unwatchable but left me ice cold on the whole. 3/10 Bethany Cox