Welcome back to 1 out of 5 – Would Recommend, where SyFy originals get further than art house pictures. In honor of winter finally deciding to get started, we’re watching the 2014 disaster movie (in several sense of that phrase) Icetastrophe.
What’s The Plot?
Damned Kryptonians, always moving in and wrecking the property values.
A mysterious meteorite crashes near a small town, sending waves of deadly flash freezing ice in all directions! It’s up to an astrophysics grad student and a local handyman to save the town before everyone in it is turned into human popsicles. Standard “This person is missing in the disaster” or “This person is a coward in the face of danger” drama is added to taste.
Who Made This Beautiful Garbage?
The Artist Formerly Known as the Sci-Fi Channel. It’s the kind of low budget, bad CGI schlock that anyone who’s ever heard of their original features has come to expect.
Five Reasons to See It
- The movie opens with a frankly ridiculous scene of our heroes trying to outrun a wave of…freezing, I guess, in a speedboat.
- When aired, this flick’s full title was Christmas Icetastrophe, and it indeed is a Christmas movie (in the sense that Die Hard is a Christmas movie).
For a non-sentient weather pattern, it has good aim.
- The Icetastrophe is shown to alternately flash freeze everything in its path (while creating land based icebergs and shooting shards of ice into the air) and being stopped by interior doors.
- The obligatory “Teens have romance in the face of disaster” subplot is between Tim Ratchet and Marley Crooge. Subtle.
- “I’m no astronomer, but I’m pretty sure a meteor’s not supposed to change the weather.” – Wrong, for multiple reasons.
Recommendation
This is not a good movie. It’s a rehash of The Day After Tomorrow’s disaster, there is approximately zero science in the fiction, it beats you over the head with its Christmas setting, and its plot is paint by numbers from start to finish. That having been said, it’s a fun little ride not unlike the disaster movies of the 1970’s and is a fine way to waste an afternoon. It’s on Netflix, so go forth and enjoy it with my blessing.
That’s not how cold works. That’s not how anything works.
NEXT WEEK: We start counting down to Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice by examining the last attempt to bring Wonder Woman to live action, the 2011 NBC Wonder Woman pilot.
