Simply Perfect

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

This review contains spoilers (sort of!). Everyone has given this film 1 out of 10, and I'm giving it 8 stars!!??? This isn't because I'm taking the mickey, or because I've gone completely insane. It's just because I love this kind of nonsense!A bunch of scientists who are immune to sub-zero temperatures have somehow discovered by looking at cave paintings that the earth is shortly to tilt on its axis, and thus create a new ice age that will wipe out humanity...except for the indestructible scientists of course! Will they save mankind? You betcha!!!This film has an absolute zero budget, a godawful script, incredibly bad acting, CGI that looks like an oil painting done by a 14 year old, sets that wobble and fall over, and incompetent direction. So, why do I like it so much? Well, just like the old Ed Wood movies (especially Plan 9) what shines through is that everyone involved in this mess tries so hard, so VERY hard to make some kind of statement - despite their complete and utter lack of talent. I just love this kind of sincerity! I can't help it!!!

ABSOLUTE ZERO is an absolute pig of a film; conceived as a zero-budget, made-in-Canada rip-off of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, it has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The modern-day disaster movies made by the SyFy Channel and The Asylum look like masterpieces by comparison.The storyline sees part of a glacier breaking off to bring winter to Miami. Soon enough the whole of Florida is at freezing point so it's up to the usual renegade scientist and his extended family to do something about it. Everything imaginable about the movie is horrid: the script, the dialogue, the almost entire lack of believability throughout. The CGI effects of snow drifts and storms look like they've been drawn onto the camera with a child's pencil. The constant melodrama is laughable.Hardworking B-movie actor Jeff Fahey is the gruff lead here, but even he looks flabby and tired by the whole thing. BAYWATCH actress Erika Eleniak plays his estranged wife, but there were only ever a couple of reasons why she was popular and they've long since headed south. As usual, a couple of annoying teenage children turn out to be the cleverest ones around.

I'm not going to talk about the admittedly silly premise of the film, because it happens to be similar to the premise on which Val Guest built "The Day the Earth Caught Fire," a very good sci-fi/disaster anti-nuke drama from the early '60s. Guest demonstrated that the way to deal with a silly 'scientific' premise was to unravel it gradually, having no one accept it on face value, until it could no longer be denied; while concentrating your film-making abilities on the dramatic interaction between well-developed characters, supplying them with a convincing visual backdrop of the world eroding into chaos.Well that certainly doesn't happen in this film. The reason other reviewers can complain about the silly premise is because there isn't really anything else to the film - the characters are flat, the dialog just streams of clichés, the dramatic interaction unbelievable when not completely absent - and the premise itself is handled very badly.That leaves the question of whether the film presents a convincing visual backdrop of the imminent disaster of Miami suddenly freezing over. Question? actually, it's a joke.Here's the tell-all moment about the budgeting of the film and the incompetence with which it is made - I think it half, but I remember the percentage higher, of the shots used to depict the effect of Miami's freezing and the response of the population there are localized on a single hotel swimming pool. That's right, a swimming pool, and a rather small one (low budget hotel for a low budget movie). The 20 or 30 people around it (popular swimming pool!) are swimming or lying around on deck chairs - then the camera shakes, and people get out of the water and people fall into the water and the camera shakes some more and people run around and scream - cut to CGI of birds eye view of Florida freezing over, cut to swimming pool cut to a small bit of beach front with obvious fake snow on it, back to the swimming pool, cut to the central characters trying to find each other through cell phones, then back to the swimming pool - it was amusing until it became patently obvious that the film-makers didn't care about their movie, didn't care to entertain their audience, only cared about getting paid for filling up a time-slot on a cable TV channel....I admit that the first half of the film, particularly the episodes in the Antarctic are fairly well handled for a B-movie. But Once the film returns to Miami for the remainder, it sinks to a level of casual incompetence that only television allows for.Not even a decent time-waster; I stayed just to see how dumb it could get. It gets pretty dumb, believe me.

The science was bad, and this comes from a guy who loves 'living dead' movies. Most of it was mediocrely bad, but there was one line that created a new bar for stupidity, 'More ice bergs have formed...' The writer actually seems to believe that ice bergs just pop up out of nowhere in Florida marinas.There's another thing. The movie operates under the premise that Florida is the center of the universe.There are actually shots of a few good looking girls in the movie, but they may as well have not been they were so well covered.There was nothing to save this movie at all. The acting was OK, the effects were cheap, but OK. blah blah blah If you want to see something similar, but better, go see The Day After Tomorrow.