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.

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?

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.

Meteor Storm (2010) TV movie

In the 2010 Meteor Storm TV movie created for the SyFy Channel in the United States, a meteor shower from a comet oribiting the Earth threatens to destroy San Francisco and then the world.

Solar Attack (2006) TV movie

The premise of the 2006 Solar Attack TV movie is that the sun is ejecting enormous solar flares that are disrupting life and electrical equipment on and above the earth. The fear is that multiple flares reaching the Earth could ignite the vast volume of methane gas in the atmosphere, creating a gigantic overhead firestorm that would suffocate all life on the planet's surface.

NYC: Tornado Terror (2008) TV movie

New York City gets destroyed by a tornado-like storm cell that's likened to the superstorm on Jupiter that creates the Red Spot and is also reminiscent of, ok, actually it was ripped from the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow in which tornadoes destroyed Los Angeles. That's the premise of the 2008 TV movie NYC: Tornado Terror broadcast on Canada's Showcase network on January 14, 2010.

Path of Destruction (2005) TV movie

Nanobots unleashed after an accident on an oil drilling platform threaten to destroy the world by producing bad weather, bad acting and bad special effects in the 2005 TV movie Path of Destruction. Somehow the United States military is also to blame, but then they've always been an easy target.

Meteor (2009) TV movie

I didn't realize at first that the 2009 TV movie Meteor broadcast in two parts on July 12 and 19 was a remake of the 1979 feature film of the same title. The premise is the same for both: a comet hits an asteroid and changes its orbit. What are the odds that the asteroid will head straight to Earth? In Hollywood, it's always 1 to 1 odds where asteroids and meteors and their chances of striking Earth and obliterating the planet or human civilization are concerned.

Christopher Lloyd, who plays an astronomer with a "cry wolf" reputation for a Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) official played by Jason Alexander, was billed as one of the stars. Lloyd's character, who seemed to be a remix of his Back to the Future one, was killed off fairly early in part one. His female protege goes through a series of unbelievable adventures, including stumbling into a Mexican police station that's been taken over by either on-site prisoners or escaped inmates from a prison. She manages to escape, all the while clutching her laptop computer with its precious calculations on the trajectory of an asteroid named Kassandra heading to Earth. A number of sub-plots are played out, all of which are rather contrived and some of the main characters in these different sub-plots converge at the end of part 2.

Of course the Earth is saved from a horrible fate when the young female astronomer manages to convince the U.S. military to reprogram their nuclear missiles and those of the Russians and Chinese while in flight and minutes before they're set to impact the asteroid so that the missiles will detonate before impact and with their blast cushion deflect the asteroid away from the Earth and also not let nuclear radiation poison the atmosphere. Whew, I'm glad we were able to stop that from happening. The TV movie ends rather gloomily, however, when in the concluding scene the female astronomer tells the male lead character of another asteroid headed our way in a few years time for yet another close call.