Tuesday, April 17, 2012

2012 Ice Age (2011) TV movie

2012 Ice Age from 2011 has to be one of the worst disaster TV movies ever made. A massive series of volcanic eruptions in Greenland causes an ice shelf to detach and head to North America "really really fast." Those pesky glaciers seem to have a mind of their own. Canada gets hit first by this icewall turned glacier that seems to disobey the laws of physics every minute. The scientist father of the family, played by Patrick Labyorteaux, can't seem to figure things out. His stock answers to questions from his wife and son about what's happening around them are phrases like "I don't know", "maybe", "it's possible". This TV movie is so bad it's actually worth watching, from the giant triangular pieces of glacier blown up by missile strikes from jet fighters that mostly land point first to the dreadful small plane flight with the computer-generated icing of its wings, a sad tribute perhaps to the 2012 movie with John Cusack. There are also echoes in here of The Day After Tomorrow.

Annihilation Earth (2009) TV movie

Beware the supercollider network, for it will destroy the world or at least a good chunk of it. Annihilation Earth, a 2009 TV movie filmed in Bulgaria for the Syfy network, stars Marina Sirtis (you may remember her as Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation TV series and movies) and Luke Goss. The basic plot is that the terrorist attack on a global network of supercolliders creates a black hole inside the Earth. Of course there's no known science that can stop a black hole from consuming all mass and energy around it, so you can probably guess how this ends.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

The Mist (1980) novella

Stephen King's 1980 novella The Mist, originally published as a short story of the same title and later a 2007 movie, contains a far bleaker ending than what was depicted in the movie, though that too was pretty horrific. The movie pretty well follows the novella up until the point at which the group of characters including the "hero", David Drayton, leave the supermarket to try and escape. The impression you are left with in the novella is that The Mist has enveloped all of Massachusetts and possibly even more of the New England states so that the end of the world may very well be at hand. The Mist is in many ways a precursor to Stephen King's epic novel Under the Dome (2009), except in the latter there are no extra-dimensional monsters. Quoting Stephen King, the Wikipedia entry on Under the Dome notes that the novel "concerns itself with how people behave when they are cut off from the society they've always belonged to." This is exactly what happens in both the novella and movie versions of The Mist.

Seattle Superstorm (2012) TV movie

A Soviet Union Cold War experiment gone bad may spell not only the end of Seattle, Washington, but also the world in the 2012 apocalyptic thriller Seattle Superstorm. First broadcast in Canada on April 7, 2012, this TV movie gives new meaning to the phrase, The family that fights the apocalypse together, stays together. Not only were the effects about as believable as those in many 1950s and 1960s mutant monster movies from Hollywood and Japan, but the plot was atrocious and the acting just passable. Not to give away too much, but how was it that the key Soviet scientist involved in the experiment just happened to turn up in Seattle the day the orbiting craft carrying a substance that triggered the near-apocalypse re-entered the atmosphere and was shot down by a U.S. Navy battleship?

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Stonehenge Apocalypse ( 2010) TV movie

A completely ludicrous and unbelievable doomsday scenario, the 2010 TV movie Stonehenge Apocalypse literally starts off with a bang when an underground archaeological dig in Maine, which appears to have uncovered something left by the ancient Egyptians, triggers an energy surge and causes a mysterious movement of the monolithic stones at Stonehenge, England. And it's all downhill from there, beginning with the lone conspiracy theorist who flies to England to start his own investigation into one of the Mayan pyramids at Chicen Itza which also mysteriously moves and turns into a nuclear bomb-like exploding volcano.