Dernier Noël avant l'Apocalypse

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.

A meteorite brings ice and freezing temperatures, which threatens to harm the residents of a small Montana town at Christmas.

It would be nice to be able to say good things about this film, but there really is nothing nice to say. The script is nonsense, the science completely made up (remember when SyFy had heart?) and none of the actors seem anything special. The romantic aspect is garbage, with two overall pale kids pretending to be cold... and not trying very hard, because the girl never even puts her hood up.

Someone thought they were being clever by naming the rival families Ratchet and Crooge, an obvious allusion to "A Christmas Carol". The head of the Crooge family is Ben, clearly a shortening of Ebenezer. But the problem is that the name "Crooge" sounds so forced coming out of the characters' mouths... there had to be a better way.

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.

It was very close to being so bad that it was fun to watch, but it lacked the necessary tongue in cheek or at least going over the top. In the end it was boring, really boring, while taking itself seriously. For something that doesn't make any sense, the film ran like its makers expected viewers to take it seriously as well.

For me the only notable thing was that the main cast was mostly taken from the Continuum TV show. Other than that everything was really silly, just not silly enough to entertain.

But that's just me. If you believe in meteor(ite)s that can lead to growing ice crystals that suck the heat from an area the size of a small town, while not interfering with the rest of the world climate, then this is the film for you.

Here's a quick science lesson from a non-scientist: a (y!)asteroid hits its target - a planet - travelling FAR more than the speed of sound (appx. 767 mph).

At this speed, air can't move fast enough around an object; there's a shockwave (the 'sonic boom'), and the air's speed causes it to heat up (that's called FRICTION). The higher the speed, the faster - and hotter - the air.

So, an asteroid hitting Earth will be travelling approximately 24-THOUSAND mph.

That will cause enough heat to ignite things without being lit with fire.

If you've read this far and understood this simple science explanation, congrats; you now know something most grade schoolers know.

Correction: you know what? Most people went to a semi-decent school and paid even a bit of attention (if they just like to watch shows on either science or even aircraft).

The point's this; it's frightening how stupid anything would have to be to come up with such idiotic tripe.

There are films that are purposefully made that are campy... over the top, and 'play' with reality and facts for fun.

This is NOT that.

It takes itself seriously. It takes its... (il)logic seriously.

I'm not going to go off and waste my time about how quickly THE SMARTEST nation on planet Earth has utterly destroyed its educational system, focusing on non-educational horse ca-ca, and people who believe in 'magic' (that's religion, especially as followed by Southerners) have totally helped disembowel the young's futures.

What do we get?

Garbage like this.

I really, REALLY hope every single person involved in this nightmare never works in ANY media again.

I'm lucky; I could tell that this was offal before it began, and I only watched a few minutes (mostly on fast-forward) to get a taste of this, but this was more than enough to leave me angry and disgusted that ANYONE would finance this, ANYONE would 'write' this (and others read it, and not only laugh and retch, but tell the crayon-scribbling mentally incapacitated person how idiotic this was) that I wasted precious minutes of my life? Minutes that could've been better used doing ANYthing.

I hope you won't be.