Christmas Icetastrophe TV Movie Review – The Cold is A Coming

Runtime: 86 minutes

Release Date: December 20, 2014

Rating: NR

Director: Jonathon Winfrey

Anyone who ever visited or read my blog in the past knows that I have a soft spot in my heart for bad disaster movies. That is exactly why I grabbed Icetastrophe, also known as Christmas Icetastrophe, the first time I saw it in Family Video.

Charlie (Victor Webster) is a man living in a small town when disaster strikes. The sky suddenly opens up and releases a torrent of ice and snow on the town. What actually happens, according to the film anyway, is that a meteor somehow causes a major atmospheric change on earth. A piece of the meteor breaks away and hits just outside of town. This causes the temperature to drop and wreaks havoc on Charlie's town.

There are tons of other stories going on in the same film. Charlie's son goes crazy after finding out that his rich girlfriend is lost in the cold with her brother, so he goes off to chase her down. Charlie's wife is stuck in the community center with the girl's mother and trying to find out what happened to both their kids. Oh, and the girl's father is more concerned with saving himself than dealing with anything else. There's also a grad student from a nearby university who shows up in town and asks Charlie to help her find the meteor.

Icetastrophe is really pretty bad and not necessarily bad in a good way. Having just finished Continuum on Netflix, I kept seeing people in this movie, wondering what I knew them from, and looking them up to see that there were on Continuum. I really think that the producers of that show had some extra cash leftover and decided to just use some of the cast to make a bad TV movie.

Of all the cheesy scenes in the movie, the cheesiest involves Charlie and the grad student. The two are in the midst of running away from the freeze, which is apparently taking over the entire town, when they get to a lake. They hop on a boat, speed across the lake, and look back to see the lake freezing behind them. It definitely gives new meaning to the term cold front.

Webster is probably better in this movie than he is in other stuff. I still remember him from his time on the soap opera Days of Our Lives, which I think every girl in my college dormitory watched, but he has a tendency to either be good or be really wooden. He's actually a little stronger in this movie than he is in other roles, though still not as good as he is on Continuum. The rest of the actors in the movie are just kind of there. I can't really highlight any one specific person because most are generally forgettable.

Icetastrophe, also known as Christmas Icetastrophe when it first aired, isn't nearly as much fun as I imagined it might be. It's just another one of those television movies that I watch once and promptly forget about.