12 Disasters of Christmas

• Canada / USA • 2012 • 90m •

• Directed by: Steven R. Monroe. • Starring: Ed Quinn, Magda Apanowicz, Holly Elissa, Roark Critchlow, Andrew Airlie, Ryan Grantham, Greg Kean, Kaj-Erik Eriksen, Donnelly Rhodes, Brenna O'Brien, Christine Willes, Scarlett Bruns, Jeff Sanca. • Music by: Michael Neilson.

It's Christmas Eve when an ominous dark star appears in the sky; could this star be a sign that Judgment Day is near? When massive earthquakes and natural disasters tear apart cities, it seems that the day of reckoning is upon us - and now a small band of heroes must come together to save the world!

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Trailer

1:14

Review:

Image from: 12 Disasters of Christmas (2012)

Please do not consider wasting two whole hours of your life on this turd, possibly hoping (as I did) that it will fall into that 'so bad it's good' territory. This movie was so awful it skipped that category altogether and went straight into the land of 'forgettable and generic'. I'll try and go through methodically rather than just wax annoyed about this Syfy dud: PLOTSTORY- The film is a doomsday sci-fi story set in a small Northern town and based on the premise that the Mayans predicted the end times and then warned us using coded messages in the song "The 12 Days of Christmas." Yes, really, the one with the French hens. The writers waste no time in flinging far-fetched and mostly unexplained disasters at the characters, from hilariously fatal icicles to hurricanes to the dreaded Jello Sky only previously seen in Ghostbusters II. The characters are incredibly cartoonish (soulless corporate goons, rebellious teen girls, religious fruitcakes, the gang's all here!) and the writing is so weak in parts it is embarrassing to watch actual grown-ups act out clunky dialogue and a confusing narrative a fourth grader may as well have written. Which brings me to my next point.

ACTING- The film hangs its hat primarily on Jacey, a young girl with special powers, and her father, as they go through tired heroics trying to decipher a book of Mayan cartoons, save the world, and repair their strained relationship, natch. The actors here do little more than act as cardboard stand-ins for characters so flat and incomplete even THEY don't seem to believe them. I wasn't convinced that any of the people were in even the slightest bit of peril (and trust me, peril comes at every character from all sides) other than perhaps the dog, which had the good sense to leave early on before things got so bad that I had second-hand embarrassment for anyone who appeared on screen. Without spoiling anything, suffice to say that the best bits of acting (and I use that term loosely) are generally the people who display expressions of actual horror- as opposed to boredom- before they are dispatched of violently by the doom du jour.

MUSIC AND SOUND FX- Nothing special to see here; the film carries your typical Asylum-quality generic music tracks to try and amp up whatever terror or concern we're intended to feel, although I must say that occasionally you get a satisfying crunch or rip whenever a hapless townsperson is brutally killed because the Mayans got their panties in a bunch and we didn't pay enough attention to a Christmas song.

...In closing, yeah, it was just that bad. Also, here's a parting thought: we're meant to buy that Jacey and her family are descended from Mayan prophets, and their pale-Caucasian-small-Northern-town-ishness is hand waved by the resident Smart Theory Guy by simply saying that thousands of years of intermarrying with Europeans has made them not remotely Hispanic. Seeing as how there are still Maya peoples (an ethnic group) alive today in Mexico and Central America, isn't this kind of racist or at best, wildly ignorant? I kind of hope so because it gives me one more thing I can complain about with this movie. After giving my two hours I feel I've earned as much. Don't make the same mistake I did, folks.

Review from the Internet Movie Database.