Once November hits near Cleveburg, and I suspect anyplace else that has measurable snowfall, we start getting warnings all over the place from the National Weather Service and local TV weather personalities about the winter calamities to come.

It actually starts in October when we get the “seasonal” forecast complete with random guesstimates of how cold it’s going to be and how much snow we’re supposed to get. I’m not sure if the weatherpeople actually keep track of whether they’re right or not as the years progress, but that’s like all those sports-betting
prognosticators who say for weeks and weeks that one team’s going to go win a championship, but, oops, they don’t.

Folks sometimes have a hard time admitting when they’re wrong, and they sure as heck are not going to highlight that they goofed up. It’s a credibility thing, which is hard to come by these days. A lot of people would rather look good than be credible, and we are not just talking meteorologists here.

Random prognostications aside, it’s not until the first flakes fly do we get the TRUE brunt of winter’s fury – the icy sidewalks and carnage that happens because folks have forgotten how to operate in the approximately 260 days since it last snowed.

Were this 1100 A.D., it’s the kind of weather in which true Vikings would frolic while wearing their fur Speedos.

But here, nearly a millennium later in modern times, it portends death and destruction.

This is what is known as Snowmageddon.

In the spirit of having experienced our first Snowmageddon of the season (yep — you can have multiple Snowmageddons in winter because if all the snow melts, people will still forget how to handle ice and snow, making the ghost Vikings laugh even more in their fur Speedos), I figured I’d review “Snowmageddon,” a SyFy Channel flick from 2011, in the spirit of winter and as a celebration of my survival.

The movie starts promisingly in the opening second by using the John Carpenter font (Albertus). We see in the first scene that this is the fictional town of Normal, Alaska.

But that’s red flag uno: Alaska is cold. If you set a Snowmageddon in Alaska, it’s going to have to be one heck of a Snowmageddon to challenge hearty Alaskans where it hits 30-below. That means writer Rudy Thauberger set forth quite the production challenge for director Sheldon White, who did similar flicks like “Kaw” (killer birds) and “Super Storm” (killer storm) and “Killer Mountain” (killer mountain).

But then we come to find out the flick is actually a Christmas movie set on December 23rd. So I almost stopped watching since we’re past Orthodox Christmas and it’d be tough to get this one to pass for a Lunar New Year flick. So the best solution may be just waiting until December to check this one out because there is only a mere trace of Snowmageddon happening here. But then I remembered that my daughter pleaded with me to leave the tree up in the house for a while, so I didn’t feel so bad.

I trudge on: It’s a Twilight Zone 101 setup/reheat – a kid named Rudy (Dylan Matzke) finds a gift on the doorstep of their house. He brings it in, and it’s a snowglobe that has a mini version of Normal, Alaska’s downtown and the surrounding area inside. His dog doesn’t like the snowglobe.

But he goofs with the globe’s mechanism anyway and a fissure appears in the replica town inside the globe. Lo and behold, the same happens in the full-sized town.

And really, that’s the flick. Nobody can leave the town, so we know somebody involved with the story saw the “St. Elsewhere” finale or the end of “Cemetery Man.” People monkey with the globe. Disastrous stuff happens as a result of that, and then the people either rescue themselves or they get pretty sanitarily dispatched by, in order, a Christmas tree felled by an earthquake, an avalanche, a vehicle explosion, stony spikes erupting from the ground (three of em). The body count doesn’t hit double-digits, there’s not a ton of peril, there’s a thimbleful of blood, and just one person perishes in what I would think in true Snowmageddony fashion (as a result of the freakish snowfall and blast of frigid Arctic death produced by the Snowmageddon).

Eventually the hero sheriff John (David Cubitt from “Medium,” and a whole lotta other television) chucks the snowglobe down into a fiery abyss “Lord of the Rings”-style after yelling at the Snowcat he’s operating a lot. I might have missed it, but it’s never definitively explained whether Satan or an evil Santa dropped off the artifact or not. At one point it’s suggested that it was an awful lot like the Greek myth of Pandora’s Box and Hephaestus gets blamed. (That’s Vulcan in mythical Roman nomenclature, no relation to Mr. Spock. Well, maybe the eyebrows).

The funniest thing is that if they listened to the family dog, which declared staunch opposition to the snowglobe from the moment it entered the house three minutes into the flick, then nothing would have happened.

Instead:

Best parental guidance: Mom Beth to daughter Jennifer: “You were flirting, which is way worse than ogling.”

Best way to recover from the previous night’s earthquake: City crews hand shovel big piles of gravel on top of the fissures that the prior night’s quake created.

Best way to cut somebody free: Rather than snag a shard of metal or glass from the chopper they crashed while trying to deliver Christmas gifts(?), aid(?), John’s wife Beth opens up a bunch of the gifts to find something sharp.

Best way to court hypothermia: “Pro snowboarder” Derrick wears gloves periodically and John, Beth and Jennifer aren’t wearing stocking caps during their rescue missions. On a mountain. In Alaska. They live in Alaska. In December.

Best impersonation of an “Antiques Roadshow” appraiser: When Normal antique shop proprietor Fred tells Rudy “There’s no markings, no serial number, no ‘Made in China.’ I don’t know about a curse, but this is certainly the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.” He also equates it to the Pandora’s Box myth. Fred also provides the best pseudo-Satanic summation of the proceedings: “Well, I’ll be damned, an honest-to-goodness Christmas miracle.”

Best scene that defies my knowledge of physics as I remember it from school: A multi-ton Snowcat is trapped on a plateau of ice surrounded by a lake of fire.

Best disappearing act: Rudy’s babysitter Mary goes off to look for Rudy by herself and (we think) gets killed by a stalagmite that explodes from the ground, one of three folks in the flick who meet that exact same fate, mostly off screen. Not snow, not ice shards, not the chilling death of hypothermia. Stalagmites.

The IMDB trivia says this flick was shown at one point under the title “Snowglobe Christmas,” which would have made so much more sense. Using that retitling and setting it in anywhere other than Alaska (Colorado, for instance), where the distinct lack of snow wouldn’t have been so flipping apparent, this flick would have worked better. But it wasn’t, so it didn’t.

One star.

Attention filmmakers: There’s still a doable idea for a flick if you REALLY want to use the “Snowmageddon” concept. If you remember the whole newscast portion of the original “Night of the Living Dead” or the first part of 1978’s “Dawn of the Dead,” you can have a TV newscaster reporting live during a real Snowmageddon with overconfident knobs in dually pickups fishtailing past white-knucklers in their hybrids crashing into the medians while people with electric cars freeze to death when their car batteries run out. You don’t have to even come up with an excuse for phone outages. We’re talking a slushy “Death Race 2000.”

Probably could do it found footage with dashcams.

Probably could do it for about $150 (with a large portion of that going toward the
newscaster/narrator’s hair care).

Might even be able to do it anthology-style.

If someone puts a REAL Snowmageddon movie together, I pledge to check it out.

You can watch this “Snowmageddon” on blu-ray or DVD, and you can see if it’s streaming
anywhere here.