Nobody can accuse this movie of not delivering on its title. It's an absolute zero alright. I'd dare to go so far as to call it possibly the most worthless film I've seen thus far this year. Not just a terrible rip-off of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, which wasn't exactly stellar filmmaking to begin with, ABSOLUTE ZERO skimps on its premise as much as possible to the point of making me wonder why make it in the first place. This movie reeks of having had its budget slashed dramatically before filming began, and despite no longer having the financial capabilities to make the sort of disaster flick they intended to they still went ahead and made it. I can almost hear the producers talking to the screenwriter right now.

"Yeah, see, the budget got slashed again so, umm, I'm gonna need you to do some major rewrites. Could you keep the actual disaster stuff limited to pages 3, 25-26, and 55-58; and keep the entire third act confined to an office building, would you? That would help tremendously. Oh, and the big finale - we'll just have to scrap that altogether. Just write in a news broadcast to fill in the blanks. Be sure to toss in some sort of government, military, or corporate villain along the way. Audiences love those. Before I forget; here's a list of scenes from THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW I'd like you mimic. I'll need all this done by Wednesday at the latest. Shooting starts on Friday."

Remember the scene from the beginning of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW where Dennis Quaid narrowly avoided falling into that massive gorge that had just appeared in the iceberg he was standing on? ABSOLUTE ZERO opens with a rip-off of that scene, only this time someone actually does take a death plunge into the chasm. After introducing us to Jeff Fahey's scientist working for a Miami-based corporation, the movie has him shipped down to Antarctica for 25 more minutes of frozen tundra in-action. In other words, the opening few minutes of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW have been stretched out to compose the entire first act of ABSOLUTE ZERO.

New drinking game for those watching this first act: every single time that ice-roving truck is shown slowly creeping across the screen - take two shots. That's right. Two shots! Trust me. The quicker you get hammered, the easier it'll be to get through this snoozer.

The explanation behind this sudden ice age will have to do with a polarity shift at the North & South Poles. Frankly, the science in movies of this ilk have become so increasingly far fetched I don't even know why the writers of these films bother to try and constantly have characters explain either what they believe could be happening or what is happening or what can be done to prevent it from happening or what can be done to undo what’s happened. ABSOLUTE ZERO's second act is almost nothing but such scientific gobbledygook conversations. Heck, the film even keeps repeating a mantra: "Science is never wrong."

The second act has Fahey's scientist venturing back to Miami to meet up with a scientist colleague who just happens to be married with a kid to his ex-lover, former Baywatch babe turned b-movie go-to gal Erika Eleniak. Fahey, the husband, and his two student assistants will spend a good deal of time in front of computer screens putting together weather models. They'll even devise a clock that's counting down to exactly when the ice age will begin. You're going to see a lot of that clock.

Complicating matters is Fahey's corporate creep of a boss, shown smirking mightily about how the company is going to use Fahey's research to scare government officials into giving them untold billions in funding to try and undue Earth's sudden polarity shift (???) even as he denies it’s happening, despite the news having just reported the appearance of an iceberg off the coast of Miami.

Those news reports are also how the movie cheats. Instead of actually filming disaster scenes, evacuation scenes, etc. the movie just has a female news anchor on the air reporting on whatever meteorological anomaly is going on at the time. News cut-ins about severe weather that don’t even include an on-air meteorologist: welcome to the world of ABSOLUTE ZERO, folks.

Fahey will crash that meeting with the government and military brass to offer his own personal brand of imminent doomsaying, which he does in such a hyper melodramatic manner as to doom his own cause. From that point on until the end of the movie, Fahey will angrily yell the majority of his lines.

I'm sure you're all familiar with the seven stages of death? Jeff Fahey gives a performance that conveys the five stages of "I told you so."

STAGE 1: "There's a chance I might have to say I told you so."
STAGE 2: "I'm hoping I'm wrong and don't have to say I told you so."
STAGE 3: "Oh my God! You've got to believe me! I told you so!"
STAGE 4: "Why the hell didn't you listen to me? I told you so!"
STAGE 5: "Now that I've told you so let's focus on getting out of this alive."

Erika Eleniak's performance reeks of, "Look; you paid me to show up and recite my lines but you're not paying me enough to give a damn."

The almost non-existent disaster portion of the movie consists mainly of crap being blown about while people run around aimlessly in a panic, sometimes falling down or getting hit with debris. It's sort of reminiscent of the scene in SUPERMAN II where the three Kryptonian supervillains used their super breath to blow away the denizens of Metropolis, only this isn’t anywhere near as comical. We'll also be shown satellite photos of an increasingly white North America and many computer generated matte paintings of frozen cityscapes perfectly suited for a videogame version of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW. And a few more news reports too, none of which are delivered with any real sense of apocalyptic urgency.

The film's only real special effects sequences involve microbursts of super cold air that are a lot like the moments from THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW when the sub-freezing temperatures descended from the sky. The difference is this time they come down in the form of a tornado that causes what looks like a mini atom bomb explosion of coldness on the ground. It's almost like an avalanche falling from the sky. Obviously another victim of the film's budget, we only get this somewhat neat effect twice.

The second one of these microbursts will claim the life of Eleniak's scientist hubby, who had already fallen victim to a flying palm tree through the car window. Actual amount of time Eleniak's character spends mourning the death of her husband: one line of dialogue and not until the last five minutes of the film. Three lines later, Fahey's character expresses regret over having spurned their relationship years earlier and professes his undying love for her to this day. She looks back at him glassy-eyed like a woman who'd been waiting her whole life to here him say this. Classy.

The horrid third act to this horrid film has Fahey, Eleniak, her young daughter, and those two comic relief assistants racing to his corporate headquarters to lock themselves into this biodome vault thingamajig inside the research portion of the building in order to ride out the new ice age. Instead of having a disaster movie culminate with, you know, disaster-related stuff, this movie gives us a quest to get some computers online, a stuck elevator rescue, a helicopter crashing into the roof, characters in environmental suits trying to navigate their way across railings outside the building, and a race against the clock to find a missing child. And just as the film's opening totally ripped-off THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW's opening, ABSOLUTE ZERO culminates with another rip-off from that film: a mad dash down a hallway to safety while being chased by sub-freezing temperatures. The greedy boss is tossed in just to complicate matters a bit.

This coma-inducing fiasco of a film - one of the sorriestexcuses for a disaster flick ever - comes from the same writing-directing duo that brought us the Sci-Fi Channel's DISASTER ZONE: VOLCANO IN NEW YORK. That one wasn't anything to get excited over but at least it wasn't boring and did provide viewers with a few moments of cheesy disaster movie goodness. ABSOLUTE ZERO makes DISASTER ZONE: VOLCANO IN NEW YORK look like a big budget Irwin Allen production. Disaster flicks should be fun, exciting, thrilling, nail-biting, and even a little corny. Most importantly, they gotta deliver on the disaster. ABSOLUTE ZERO is, well, an absolute zero.