The other night Jay and I decided to watch a movie. As I was pouring the wine, Jay went ahead and picked one on Netflix that we’d never seen. The result was Absolute Zero with a rating of 2.5 out of 5 stars on Netflix. That means somebody had to give it MORE than 2 stars to average out to the .5 star. I haven’t yet rated it on Netflix, but I would probably have to give it a 1.0. And that would be very generous on my part.

The story line, according to IMDb (which I had to read to make sure that I understood what the actual plot was supposed to be):

“INTER SCI climatologist David Koch has evidence that a shift in the Earth’s polarity triggered the last Ice Age…in a single day. Now, it’s happening again, and there’s no time to escape. As the temperature plummets, Miami is blasted with snow and ice. Evacuation routes are jammed. The only chance David, his old flame Bryn, and a few other hopeful survivors have is to hole themselves up in a special chamber at INTER SCI. A desperate race for survival is ignited as nature’s fury rages and the temperature plunges toward -459.67° F…ABSOLUTE ZERO! Written by Echo Bridge Home Entertainment  ”

This is our “hero” after he has landed in Antarctica. Everybody else walks around wearing giant coats, but not our strong hero. Nope! Just a fleece is all that he needs in this cold climate. Also, per what I saw on the movie, when you are outside talking to others you can’t see your breath! I will have to check with my friend’s husband (he has been there a few times for work) to see if there is something about the atmosphere that makes it impossible for your breath to be seen.

Have you ever watched Mystery Science Theater 3000 ? It’s a show where Joel (or later it was Mike) was forced to sit through really bad movies with two of his robot friends. Throughout the entire movie the guys at the bottom, as seen in this picture, make comments. They ad lib their own movie dialogue or make comments on what’s going on. For instance, I can’t recall the name of the movie they were watching on this episode, but during the ‘high speed’ chase on these altered golf carts one of the guys made the helmet comment. (Note to self… I have this episode on DVD… watch it with Jay).

Anyway, Absolute Zero would be a perfect candidate for MST3K! As it was, I was constantly making comments about this horrid piece of film. For instance, there’s a scene after the hero shows up in Anarctica where he’s talking to a friend, except they never look at each other. The old guy is up front and center with the hero standing behind him. They are catching up, yet not actually talking TO each other. And the hero makes the same face throughout the entire movie.

There’s the issue that “Science is never wrong,” as they say throughout the movie, and yet they got the science wrong! They claim that absolute zero is being caused by the shifting of the magnetic poles of the earth, and yet that’s now how climate works. The magnetic pull might affect the weather patterns, but it’s not going to instantly change the middle of the earth to suddenly freeze over.

When absolute zero is creeping up on them (and you can see it because the really horrible special effects shows a frosty cloud running over everything) somehow the people in this movie are safe in the hero’s work lab. I’m still not quite sure how the laws of science and nature don’t pertain to his lab, but they were safely ensconced there for a few minutes until a helicopter arrived to save them. Which brings up another question for me… I’m not very good at the whole science thing, but I thought that absolute zero means that absolutely nothing would be able to happen because this is the point where ALL molecular activity comes to a stop? So, if it’s absolute zero did the helicopter somehow have the same magic material that the lab had that would allow the helicopter to even function, let alone allow humans to continue to function? The hero should have used his science to make wet suits for ice fishermen out of the material his lab was made out of so that nobody ever would get hypothermia again.

This whole film was a rotten, stinky mess. I don’t even know what to tell you about next. How about the fact that the hero’s love interest married the hero’s best friend years ago (and the hero never knew because he was too self-absorbed to worry about his friends), then the best friend gets killed during the movie. I realize that there’s a lot going on, but when the opportunity presents itself, the wife doesn’t break down into tears over her husband’s demise (he was impaled by a palm tree… I told you, this movie was horrid). At the end of the movie when they are in the lab she’s practically cooing over the hero, and her husband has been dead for less than 6 hours!

Oh, and that’s another thing! Apparently this guy is so smart that he can tell you that they only had four hours and some odd minutes before absolute zero hit Miami. After he discovers this you get flashes of the clock counting down as they spend the rest of the movie trying to get back to the lab. They leave one room and they have an hour and thirty minutes left… next thing you know they have to go a different way to get to the lab and they only have twenty minutes before absolute zero arrives. They were only four floors away! This isn’t the Mall of America! It’s an office building in Miami. Even if they were on the top floor, it wouldn’t take over an hour to run that distance.

What confuses me is that with most disaster movies once the disaster hits there’s a lesson to be learned, or they have a new goal to attain. At the end of the movie Twister you knew that the next step was to learn more about these tornadoes thanks to the little doo-dads they had invented and put up into a tornado. What happens at the end of Absolute Zero? They wait to be rescued. That’s it. The whole movie is about them figuring out that it’s going to happen, and then they spend the second half trying to get to the lab so that they can hang out until they get rescued. That’s it. What happens next? You have no idea except that you’re pretty sure that the wife is not going to mourn for her husband long. Heck, the girl college student was more upset at her classmate falling to his death than the wife was about her husband being killed!!

Jay says that we need to watch more of these horrible movies. So, dear reader, it looks like you’ll have more blog posts to read about them in the future. Lucky you!