The Day After RiffTrax

Rating: 8/10 (13 October 2008)

Probably this is a good film for kids and gamers but it's a tedious cliché-ridden maelstrom for older film-watchers like me with any serious message frozen or drowned. I wish I could have seen it at 11  at 49 I think I've seen it all before except for the eye-boggling cgi cartoonery they use for cheapness nowadays.
Global capitalism's efforts to get global warming going finally causes Earth to catch a cold ushering in a new Ice Age, and giving poor old New York some more cataclysmic breakdowns to recover from. Liberty Don't Surf! Dennis Quaid (paleo-climatologist) has to rescue son Jake Gyllenhaal (schmuck) and friends from freezer. It's all pretty harmless laughable stuff anyway, but the RiffTrax soundtrack version is absolutely hilarious, a relentless pisstake I recommend watching instead of the original tosh. The scenes in the public library stumbling over all that burnable furniture to burn books and keep warm are amongst the best I've seen, along with the indestructible digi-wolves on the huge ghost ship that managed to get into the centre of the city without turning. And Gyllenhaal's watery phone call to his Dad is turned into a real tearjerker! The cartoonery is impressive, and generally a lot of money was spent to make it look good, pity the plot was plastic and the acting was wooden. At the end the Free World was given time to recover from the safety of the 51st state of the USA, Mexico.
I can't imagine ever watching the proper version because it's so so-so (maybe a 6/10), but with RiffTrax you can laugh in Armageddon's face and chuckle at catastrophe if you like.