‘Apocalypse of Ice’ Review
Stars: Tom Sizemore, Emily Killian, Ramiro Leal, Torrey Richardson, Jake Holley, Tania Fox, Xander Bailey, Christina Licciardi, Christopher William Johnson, Audrey Latt | Written by Ryan Ebert | Directed by Maximilian Elfeldt
As if we needed any more disaster this year, along comes Apocalypse of Ice from mockbuster kings The Asylum!
This time round, as if The Asylum haven’t already made a boat-load of these apocalyptic nature films before – including when Hollywood went crazy on the same subject – a massive polar vortex threatens to cover nearly all of Earth in ice. Oh and did I mention the world is also in the middle of a global pandemic..? Yes as if a pandemic wasn’t enough, in this film we get a global apocalypse too!
But hey this is The Asylum, so you know what that means don’t you? Stock footage aplenty, from empty streets thanks to a real-world pandemic, to collapsing ice caps and a myriad of clips from other movies and plenty off new footage featuring the films cast talking between themselves – typically filmed on sound stages in California – and a ton of CGI; which is this case veers from the usual terrible sub-video game look to more than passable at times! All in a days work for The Asylum!
Headliner Tom Sizemore appears in actually little more than an extended cameo, his character holed up in a ice station in the Artic (or is it Antarctic?) talking people through his findings, all the while the ice around him melting into the sea… Surprisingly Sizemore’s scientific findings seem all-too factual. You see too much fresh water has offset the salt water balance in the worlds seas and polar ice caps which, to be fair, sounds like something we could possibly expect in our future – especially if you believe the global warming warnings. The result here? A polar vortex and an “ice wall” making its way across the globe.
In a change to the usual natural disaster movies, at least here the ENTIRE world is not set to be destroyed. Well not by the forthcoming titular Apocalypse of Ice anyway! It’s discovered the only chance of survival from the cold is a 100-mile temperate zone near the equator. Which means as many people as possible need to be evacuated to that area… In the middle of a pandemic… Oh and there’s a cure for the pandemic and that, along with a virologist who discovered it, must reach the safe zone within twenty-four hours. As if people driving to Ecuador at the drop of a hat wasn’t crazy enough, there’s a totally off-the-wall subplot involving a mother, who used to be in the US Navy, tracking down her son and his girlfriend who have just been in a plane crash thanks to the freezing weather! (Which screams Roland Emmerich’s 2012? Which makes this mockbuster of that Hollywood film about 12 years too late!)
Ultimately the film follows all the usual cliches and disaster-movie tropes: the mother who saves her son later puts him in danger, his girlfriend having to step in and save him instead; our heroes struggle to get to their destination, suffering accident and injury along the way… in fact our “heroes” make so many mistakes whilst transporting the pandemic cure that they make the sh*t-show the British government made over the Covid-19 pandemic look tame in comparison! And much like the British government, when they do get to Ecuador with vaccine they’re hailed as heroes despite all the mistakes they’ve made along the way!
A decidedly average disaster movie from The Asylum, Apocalypse of Ice feels like it was an existing script penned as a cash-in on the aforementioned 2012 back in 2009, that was re-hashed, adding pandemic storyline to bring it up to date in time to cash in with the world returning to “normal”… but seriously, does anyone want to watch pandemic related movies after the events of the last year?
Apocalypse of Ice is out now.
