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Ice Quake


ICE QUAKE
(2010, Ziller)



"These weren't tremors, Colonel. These were some kind of ice geysers. Fragments of ice blasted up out of the ground. It was like nothing I've ever seen before."
"An eruption of ice fragments? Are you sure?"

That's how geologist Michael Webster (Brendan Fehr) describes this sudden threat to his superior (Victor Garber). Something that he had never seen before, probably like this SyFy film. Ice Quake follows Michael's attempts to survive this "ice quake", along with his family, while also trying to prevent a catastrophe on Earth.

For some morbid curiosity, I decided to put this on Tubi as I was doing some other thing, so I'll admit that my attention span wasn't 100% here. Anyway, there are some, uhh, expectations when tuning into an Asylum film or a SyFy original. You either expect something big and bold (like big creatures or big disasters), absurdly outlandish (like Lavantula or Santa Jaws), or a combination of both.

Unfortunately, Ice Quake offers none of that. The threat here is mostly presented as just cracks and crevices opening on the ground, and "eruptions of ice" coming out unexpectedly. Needless to say, it lacks that big scope of, say, a meteor or a big creature, or the absurdity of a fire tornado full of two-headed sharks.

What we get is this mostly dull survival journey of this family as they try to stay safe, followed by a race against time to blow some explosives that will somehow stop the methane flow from creating this "ice quakes"...? Yeah, whatever. The thing is that it lacks the tension and thrill to make us care about anything, especially since we know how it will all end.

If anything, even though most of the performances aren't very good, they're not downright awful. I do wonder what the hell is Victor Garber doing in this, but the main issue is with the bad script and the bad dialogue. The fact that some of the performances are subpar just adds to how bad it is. But again, is not necessarily that it's bad. It's just that it's boring and dull, and sometimes, that's worse.

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