Les 12 Plaies de l'apocalypse

12 disasters that are beacons of the end of times. But they ALL happen in a little town that no one ever heard of and almost no one goes to???

The key stone of any ... EVERY ... quality SciFi and horror movie is the 'suspension of disbelief'. The script and actors have to support this to ensure the audience gets drawn in and STAYS in the framework of the movie. And yet, they never once provide a sufficient explanation of why the whole world depends on a little town out in the middle of nowhere ... that didn't even exist when the architects of the prophecy was created. Come on, if you can't cover the basics do not expect a good rating.

Yes, the film crew seemed to know what they were doing and the acting was actually good But without a solid story your audience is going to drift in and out of the experience, and ultimately have a negative experience.

Please do not consider wasting two whole hours of your life on this turd, possibly hoping (as I did) that it will fall into that 'so bad it's good' territory. This movie was so awful it skipped that category altogether and went straight into the land of 'forgettable and generic'. I'll try and go through methodically rather than just wax annoyed about this Syfy dud: PLOT/STORY- The film is a doomsday sci-fi story set in a small Northern town and based on the premise that the Mayans predicted the end times and then warned us using coded messages in the song "The 12 Days of Christmas." Yes, really, the one with the French hens. The writers waste no time in flinging far-fetched and mostly unexplained disasters at the characters, from hilariously fatal icicles to hurricanes to the dreaded Jello Sky only previously seen in Ghostbusters II. The characters are incredibly cartoonish (soulless corporate goons, rebellious teen girls, religious fruitcakes, the gang's all here!) and the writing is so weak in parts it is embarrassing to watch actual grown-ups act out clunky dialogue and a confusing narrative a fourth grader may as well have written. Which brings me to my next point.

ACTING- The film hangs its hat primarily on Jacey, a young girl with special powers, and her father, as they go through tired heroics trying to decipher a book of Mayan cartoons, save the world, and repair their strained relationship, natch. The actors here do little more than act as cardboard stand-ins for characters so flat and incomplete even THEY don't seem to believe them. I wasn't convinced that any of the people were in even the slightest bit of peril (and trust me, peril comes at every character from all sides) other than perhaps the dog, which had the good sense to leave early on before things got so bad that I had second-hand embarrassment for anyone who appeared on screen. Without spoiling anything, suffice to say that the best bits of acting (and I use that term loosely) are generally the people who display expressions of actual horror- as opposed to boredom- before they are dispatched of violently by the doom du jour.

MUSIC AND SOUND FX- Nothing special to see here; the film carries your typical Asylum-quality generic music tracks to try and amp up whatever terror or concern we're intended to feel, although I must say that occasionally you get a satisfying crunch or rip whenever a hapless townsperson is brutally killed because the Mayans got their panties in a bunch and we didn't pay enough attention to a Christmas song.

...In closing, yeah, it was just that bad. Also, here's a parting thought: we're meant to buy that Jacey and her family are descended from Mayan prophets, and their pale-Caucasian-small-Northern-town-ishness is hand waved by the resident Smart Theory Guy by simply saying that thousands of years of intermarrying with Europeans has made them not remotely Hispanic. Seeing as how there are still Maya peoples (an ethnic group) alive today in Mexico and Central America, isn't this kind of racist or at best, wildly ignorant? I kind of hope so because it gives me one more thing I can complain about with this movie. After giving my two hours I feel I've earned as much. Don't make the same mistake I did, folks.

The 12 Disasters of Christmas is a Christmas-themed disaster movie from the SyFy Channel that attempts to emulate the same kind of Mayan prophecy disaster nonsense as in the big bucks Hollywood movie 2012. Except, of course, the filmmakers have a budget of about $3.60, so attempting to convey world-scale events on a tiny budget was always going to be a challenge. No surprise that they make a pig's ear of it.

This Canadian movie was helmed by Steven R. Monroe, no stranger to the B-movie genre having already made the likes of ICE TWISTERS and the I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE remake. Religious nonsense provides a backdrop to the otherwise familiar action, which sees a family trio pursued by twelve different disasters: they are forced to flee from freezing ground, invisible force fields, icicle showers, and other assorted mayhem. None of it makes much sense and it goes without saying that the CGI effects are so utterly poor as to be completely laughable.

Another laughable element of the film is to have the annoying female teen protagonist called Jacey and her parents Joseph and Mary. I suppose the scriptwriters thought this amounted to wit but they were mistaken, it's just very silly. The stuff with the magic ring seems to have been borrowed from THE LORD OF THE RINGS but inevitably given the low budget, the climax is based around human drama and betrayal rather than anything requiring money. Yes, it's dreadful.

The 12 Disasters Of Christmas is a weird movie. It is weird, because everything in it seems to be bad. The acting, the dialogues, the plot, the writing and not to forget the incredibly bad CGI (one of the worst I have ever seen). In a small town, young Jacey (Magda Apanowicz) has her birthday. And this event triggers the reappearance of 12 plagues the Mayans have encountered 1000s of years ago. But do not worry, her grandma knows she is "the chosen one" and passes an old ring on to her to stop the end of the world. There are 4 more rings to be found to stop armageddon and that gives us one and a half hours of whatever this movie is trying to be. I don't want to go into details that much, but I have to point out the CGI effects on the electric wires. I laughed so hard seeing how poorly this was executed, that the rest of the movie just left me with a smile. And not even a sour one! I even found myself enjoying it. Usually your first reaction would be, well, it was like that in the 80s sometimes. And then you notice the movie is from 2012. Nevermind then... This movie is a great opportunity for you, to show it to people who even complain about top notch CGI today. After they saw this here, they might appreciate it a lot more!

The Story seemed to copy a lot of other movies. Under The Dome and others I just cant name right now. There wasn't a lot of originality or really much entertaining about it. Cannot recommend. 3/10