Dernier Noël avant l'Apocalypse

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.

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.

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

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.

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.