Christmas Icetastrophe (2014)

Pretty Good

Did you people see the same film I saw?

A different way of telling a story

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Christmas Icetastrophe is your usual nonsense disaster movie that played on the SyFy Channel. The story is no different to at least half a dozen others that have already been made and shown on that channel, and it merely consists of characters running away from a fast-moving mess of cold air which freezes anything it touches. A meteorite caused the disaster this time around, somewhat unbelievably. The cast is made up of clichéd characters, the script is monotonous, and the references to A Christmas Carol are completely pointless. Add in your usual round of awful CGI effects and you have all the ingredients. It really is an unrewarding film.

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.

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

This movie will honestly leave you wondering why anyone would ever look at this as a finished piece of film. First of all, lets talk about the title, "Icetastrophe" .....? Is that really the only title a group of adults could come up with? You could have named it "Cold at Christmas" or "The Mysterious Meteor" or literally ANYTHING would have been better than "Icetastrophe". The plot is very underwhelming with actors who look almost as disappointed to be in this movie, as I looked while watching it. There is pointless and ridiculous flash freezing of random people, who happen to be standing ONLY steps away from other people who are miraculously untouched by the cold. Pieces of meteor keep falling and somehow slicing through cops, which would have been funny, had it not been so sad that the movie was really that level of unrealistic and stupid.The way in which the plot and dialogue describe the meteors state and behavior is in no way possible... nor is it even likely in reality for a meteor to ever behave that way! It's as though a child with no understanding of physics or astronomy, wrote the entire plot and then, directed the movie, from the point of view of a very small, very male , child like mind.The entire movie is completely cliché and predictable right down to the little love bird teenagers getting a stupid, yet happy ending.The one good thing I can say about this movie, and probably the only reason I watched it, is because the protagonist/ lead character actor, was very attractive. In closing, I honestly think this movie would have made a great parody disaster movie, had the actors been allowed to actually express in their dialogue, how terrible they truly thought the plot was, maybe throwing in a few jokes or some satire. The sad thing is, they actually meant us to take it seriously.