Snowmageddon (2011)
Foywonder
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Starring David Cubitt, Magda Apanowicz, Michael Hogan, Dylan Matzke
Directed by Sheldon Wilson
I called bullshit on Snowmageddon the very first time the kid laid hands on the supernatural snow globe at the center of this non-pocalypse. Ever owned a snow globe? Ever held a snow globe? What’s the very first thing you do upon picking up a snow globe? You shake it up real good, right? Not this kid. Nope. He handles it with the reverence of an antique clock. I can suspend my disbelief to accept that a magical snow globe can trigger natural disasters few of which actually have anything to do with ice or snow. No way in hell I can believe a kid holding a snow globe will resist the urge to shake it up something fierce.
Snowmageddon features plenty of snow but not that much “mageddon”. I’ll go so far as to say this is one of the least “mageddon” movies I’ve ever seen. An earthquake, an avalanche, a giant hailstorm, pointy rocks shooting up from the ground, and very little gets destroyed and hardly anyone dies. If you’re going to make a movie bold enough to play off the word “Armageddon”, you had better be prepared to make it feel like some sort of Armageddon is taking place. The Asylum’s 2012: Ice Age was more deserving of being called Snowmageddon. That film didn’t even have “mageddon” in its title and still delivered more far, far, far more “mageddon”.
Over half this movie centers around the aftermath of the first few snow globe triggered disasters. Two injured snowboarders are trapped on a mountain. A mother and daughter are also trapped in the wintery wild after their helicopter crashes. Two more injured men are trapped inside a bus fearing electrocution from a power pole downed during a hail strike. I clocked about 75 minutes of TV time before it ever really felt like any forward momentum in the story was achieved.
The snow globe contains an exact replica of this small Alaskan community that should have been named “Dullsville”, and some localized natural disasters occur whenever buttons on it are activated. The kid who received the supernatural snow globe appeared to spend more time playing a fantasy board game with no magical powers than he did messing with the object at the center of the story; playing the game eventually helps him figure out how to put a stop to the snow globe’s chain reaction countdown to total destruction of some kind. In fact, so much more time seemed devoted to this kid messing with the board game than the snow globe I found myself wondering why they didn’t just make it about a supernatural board game instead.
The non-explanation behind this snow globe is so preposterously vague the producers may as well have re-titled the movie Macguffingeddon.
It really felt to me like they came up with the “Twilight Zone”-ish premise of a mystical snow globe that causes natural disasters in a town that has suddenly been mysteriously cut off from the rest of the world and then were clueless where to go from there or how to even entertainingly bullshit their way through it. Okay, that’s not a completely fair statement. A movie called Snowmageddon ends with a volcano so clearly there was some major league bullshitting going on.
Flatfooted action, glacial pacing, phoned in performances, and a premise that nobody seemed to put much thought into. Some Syfy movies are at the very least enjoyably bad. This certainly isn’t one of those. It’s inoffensively lame, but damn is it lame – and boring.
Snowmageddon? More like Snoremageddon?
1 out of 5
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