Last time, I checked out “Snowmageddon,” a SyFy Channel-type movie that ended up falling many magnitudes short in the realms of overall destructiveness expected of a flick carrying such a title.

If Armageddon is supposed to be the big dealio for arms and an ultimate battle, then Snowmageddon needs to be the big dealio for snow.

It wasn’t. Mostly because:

1. It happened within a small Alaskan village or within a snowglobe.
2. Only about a half-dozen characters got offed with just one going out in a manner befitting the frozen demise befitting a Snowmageddon (buried in an avalanche).
3. The whole thing was resolved when a guy in a Snowcat chucked a cursed snowglobe off a snow plateau that defied physics and all climatological reason since it should have been melted by the river of lava below.
4. The whole thing would have been prevented if people had listened to the dog.

So, very self-contained, low body count, not much icy destruction. “Snowmaggedon” ended up getting retitled as “Snowglobe Christmas” on TV later.

My disappointment piled up faster than the off-color snow we have to avoid that my aging dog is creating at the base of my porch steps because she’s too lazy to go six feet to her left in the actual yard.

I went on this rant that a flick about a rush-hour commute where the snow crews don’t do a great job would have better carried the concept of a Snowmaggedon because a bunch of people wrecking their Priuses skidding into a Dodge Ram while eighteen-wheelers jackknife across three lanes would at least have enough going on that a person on the radio or TV could bug out their eyes and do a running commentary of the calamity being witnessed.

But here we are a week later, and most of the country has another “major winter weather event” on the horizon (can someone email in and explain why they’re not just called storms or when they are referred to as storms why they have to be named?), and behold, I find a flick that could have plausibly been titled
“Snowmaggedon” years before the first “Snowmaggedon” and would have met all of the necessary criteria, too, but they went a bit too far with their concept and setup and called it “Absolute Zero” instead of “Snowmaggedon.”

Clear as the snow on the side of a freshly plowed and salted road, right?

But Robert Lee, director of 1995’s “Cyberjack,” aka “Virtual Assassin,” a Michael Dudikoff vehicle that Joe Bob showed on MonsterVision, gave us a much better winter catastrophe in 2006’s “Absolute Zero,” which to date is the last thing he’s directed.

First of all — a couple of familiar drive-in faces show up.

Jeff Fahey, who was in Robert Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror,” “Lawnmower Man,” “Body Parts” and pretty much everywhere in late-night cable in the mid- to late-1990s when heavy breathing thrillers ruled the roost, is David Kotzman, the main scientist guy.

Erika Eleniak (“The Blob,” “Under Siege” and “Tales From the Crypt’s Bordello of Blood”) shows up as a former flame/now mom married to one of Kotzman’s academic colleagues. They both shore up a plot that, in all honesty, tears a ribcage muscle trying to swing for the fences and equal the flash freeze scenes in “The Day After Tomorrow.” But we’ll get to that.

It starts out with something rotten in Antarctica. These scientists are going to explore a cave, but it’s relatively warm – punctuated by a couple of meathead dorks running a barbecue grill. There have been a bunch of earthquakes as a result of these warming episodes and a fissure opens up. The guy who had the first two minutes of dialogue falls in, but not the two goofy grillmasters, making us wonder where we’re going to get the rest of the exposition.

That gets answered about 10 seconds later when a Miami newscaster (Dawn Chubai) talks about a couple of freak weather events that made Fort Lauderdale and one other South Florida city that had “Beach” in its name get really cold.

(Have to take a moment to give praise to Ms. Chubai, whose IMDB profile consists of 62 listed credits over the last 20 years with nearly all of the roles having her portray a news anchor, reporter or journalist. She’s found a niche and made an acting career out of it. Right on!)

To set the existential threat, aka the sorta sciency part, Fahey is David Kotzman, a scientist working for the Let’s Make it Real Cold Using Polarity Division of Miami-based weather company InterSci, which probably also has a Chemtrail Division, a Drought Division and a Let’s Flood Their Hineys Division that we regrettably never
see in action.

Kotzman flips the polarity of a room and demonstrates that things can go from hot to cold pronto. Once a certain degree of polarity is achieved, -273 C, absolute zero is reached and everything inside the room freezes and goes dark. The big boss Dr. Veet (Bill Dow, who has been in a bunch of science fiction TV series) does a slow clap after Fahey says, “Because science is never wrong.”

And while science might not be wrong, the script by writer Sarah Watson went right over the edge here. The degree of cold talked about in “Absolute Zero” exists only as an intellectual exercise in a lab and maybe (just maybe) in interstellar space if we’re talking about a deep crevasse in an asteroid out in deep space with no stars around.

Maybe.

So the story isn’t served when they aimed that particular degree of rock bottom, and here are three reasons why:

Numero Uno: The temperature difference from the absolute zero room and the observation area in the lab that Jeff Fahey’s showing off to everybody in would cause whatever clear barrier separating the rooms to explode because of the nearly 300-degree difference between the two. Or, at the very least, shrinkage.

Numero Two-o: Absolute zero couldn’t be achieved in the open environment of the planet’s surface even with a planetary polarity shift because it would not have any affect on the amount of sunlight hitting the planet’s surface. If any solar radiation is hitting the area, then it sure as heck would be warmer than absolute zero. (It could still be butt cold, a technical term meaning supremely inhospitable and a way of life in Minnesota, but definitely not absolute zero).

Numero Three-o: At the end of the flick, when the new Ice Age is threatened due to the changing polarities hitting a specific orientation and people are getting flash-frozen like they’re Gorton’s fish sticks, any snow suits and THE AIR ITSELF also would freeze, meaning that helicopter rotors wouldn’t rotate, plugs wouldn’t spark, Spandex wouldn’t span and, well, you get the point. Stuff would stop.

So by getting too cold, it creates a bunch of problems with the flick. Doesn’t mean it’s without the potential for enjoyability, but if the suspension of disbelief you’re asking of the audience is off by so many degrees, well, the viewers could go cold on you.

Anyway, Kotzman gets p.o.ed at the boss because there were some military guys at his demonstration so the boss ships him off to Antarctica where an old professor of his named Herschel is running experiments. They’re going to send a rover into that unexplored cavern the first crew was going to look at, and they find a frozen corpse that’s been there 10,000 years. Two of the people ride the Snowcat intending to go back to base as conditions deteriorate while Herschel decides to go into the cave to get the corpse and Kotzman serves as backup.

The base gets hit by a big old storm complete with ice tornadoes. The administrator guy/resident jerk Dennison gets splatted by the Survival Zone door, which is one of those half-size storage units you see on train cars. The Snowcat gets flipped by a twister and the people in that die. Herschel finds some hieroglyphics in the cave, gets hit in the head by a chunk of ice and dies right after Kotzman finds him. Not too clear how he gets word out that he’s stuck out there or where there is, but he gets back to Miami and tells his boss he quits.

The boss replies with, “I don’t think you are going to sell your $150,000 truck to pay the rent.” Kotzman quits but really kind of doesn’t because he still has access to the labs. And he drives a Hummer H2.

The TV news reports that stuff with the planet’s polarity is going sideways — a crab catch pulled up frozen crustaceans, birds are migrating north for the winter. There’s a big iceberg in a Miami marina.

So Kotzman crashes his buddy Phillip’s college lecture and they rope some TAs into testing the paint from the Antarctic cave painting. He also meets Bryn (his ex, who owns an art gallery) as well as Phillip and Bryn’s daughter Sophia. Bryn says the cave paintings look similar to Argentinian art done 10,000 years ago during the dawn of an Ice Age that happened instantaneously because of a polarity shift for the Earth.

Veet, the company boss, sees an opportunity and meets with a senator and others to persuade them to give them money and a computer model shows that the equatorial area of the planet is going to be “glaciated” in four hours and 23 minutes. So, there’s not a lot of time to do much of anything unless you have a fueled-up private jet to be honest. Kotzman also bursts into the meeting and tells the senator that he has to order an evacuation, which, if everything from 30 N to 30 S latitude is gonna be flash-frozen because the temperature is going to hit absolute zero, is not gonna do much good.

Again, if the implication is that absolute zero is going to be reached, as mentioned in the title of the FLIPPING MOVIE and in the words of the head scientist protagonist, then nothing can realistically be done by anybody about anything no matter how many pairs of wool socks you put on. Full stop.

To her credit, the newscaster and crew peace out in the news chopper and head to New York, which because of the polarity shift will now have Miami-type weather.

The TAs, Kotzman and Bryn decide to hole up in the lab, which might be insulated, but Sophia didn’t get picked up from school and so there’s a whole subplot where they have to reunite in addition to weathering the cataclysm.

Best Exchange: Kotzman: “Senator, please. You’ve got to believe me. Within hours, everything between 30 degrees North and South of the equator is going to fall into complete darkness. The temperature is going to drop to a negative 273 degrees Celsius. That is absolute zero. Nothing will survive. NOTHING!”

The senator: “Well, um, thank you for your opinion. Dr. Kotzman. Thank you.”

Best Way to Make Room for a New Daddy: A CGI palm tree goes through Philiip’s windshield and he gets pinned by it. Sophie leaves the car and Phillip gets blown away by another one of those ice twisters.

Best Acrobat: Bryn does this whole elevator rescue thing for somebody who really shouldn’t be rescued.

“Absolute Zero” was a better “Snowmaggedon” flick than “Snowmaggedon,” but a better title would’ve been “Butt Cold,” “Polar Death” or “Polarpocalypse” or “Polar Plunge,” and raise the temperature a bit.

Two and a half stars.

Check out “Absolute Zero” streaming on Hoopla or Crunchy Roll or the physical media is out there as well.