A prize from a cold, dead hand.

Rating: Null/10 (17 October 2004)

These days the B-movie has become the most lavishly funded of all of Hollywood's offerings, and it's easy to see why. Young boys grow into Old Boys - who have networks, apparently, and boys, young and old, love thrills 'n spills. Ray Harryhausen's effects were not meant to be funny, comic or warm-hearted. They were devices used to chill the bones of the audience. They thrilled and spilled, (both) and of course today's B-movies do the same. The Day after Tomorrow, doesn't try to equal The Seven Voyages of Sinbad in these stakes; it's your average 21st century B-movie. And it's a good B-movie. More disastrous than Godzilla, funnier than Alien, and colder than Volcano. One reviewer commented that it's most hysterically funny moment is when our heroes literally "run from the cold". I agree. Choice B- movie cinema is made from such moments. Giant ape climbs the Empire State building. Martians survive nuclear bombardment to be destroyed by bacteria. Big shark eats people in the Kennedys holiday resort - none of this is will ever happen. The moral of the story is: we really wish it would. Dude that would be so cool!. Nobody likes the status quo. Disaster - on a global scale, frees you from the necessity to brush your teeth - or get up early. In The Day After Tomorrow, the disaster is not over - like love in a Carpenters song, it has only just begun. That's what I like. America ends up living in Mexico, all national debt for South America removed, until (it seems by implication) the attack helicopters get there. And yet it's just so vacuous that you could never, ever, in your wildest dreams, take this movie seriously, in a political sense. You couldn't, could you?