Awful Movie Madness: Casper van Dien

Meltdown: Days of Destruction

An asteroid pushes the Earth closer to the Sun, making everything get kind of warm, and then nothing happens. At all. Well, okay, this happens:

A perfectly good shootout is rudely interrupted by the Coolmobile - a Ford Explorer with a bunch of random tubes and tinfoil all over it that we guess is somehow supposed to shield its passengers from the mildly uncomfortable heat wave Worldwide Total Planetary Global Earth Meltdown Apocalypse.

Vanilla Ice’s long-lost twin, Edward Nort(n)onBut that's it.  Casper shows off his dramatic range in this one as a loose cannon cop who plays by his own rules, rules which mostly involve not doing or saying anything interesting or entertaining.

Highlights include:

• From the same production company as Absolute Zero, except in this one everything gets mildly warm instead of stupidly cold
• There aren't any other highlights, just people wandering around on a warm summer day in Vancouver, occasionally having firefights for no reason
• Absolutely nothing fucking happens after the asteroid impact
• Total ambiguity RE: whether or not Science is Ever Wrong

You should watch this movie if:

• You hate fun (e.g. if you're German)
• You need an elephant euthanasia-grade sedative roughly equivalent to a Norse treasure hoard full of opioids
• You want to look at Casper van Dien a lot, but not while he's nuking bugholes with inverted quadruplety flip six Dutch boggle master half-twists, hanging with Michael Ironside and Jake Busey, or dressing up in an Indiana Jones costume to fight the Classically-Trained British Guy Illuminati (see: Curse of King Tut's Tomb, The)

500 MPH Storm

0.5KMPHS is first and foremost an Asylum picture, which is pretty much all you need to know going in. For those not familiar, Asylum is a proud member of that most despicable, boring, and least interesting/original phylum of scum scrapings you can dredge up from the bottom of the movie badness barrel: they make bad movies on purpose. Badly. They're bad at making bad movies. Yes, they flush truckload after truckload of perfectly good money down the proverbial shitter over and over (and over) attempting to make weak, third-rate wannabe 'spoofs' of popular movies that already sucked just fine on their own.

We bet Casper would rather have actual Vietnam flashbacks than remember his time starring in this one.Why? Who the hell knows. Because they're colossal idiots, most likely. Idiots throwing a bunch of money that some even bigger idiots keep giving them at a bunch of other idiots to act out idiotic ideas in a painfully idiotic search for that fabled "so bad it's good" aesthetic vibe, which they of course universally fail to achieve in every way (and always will). Because they're so, so goddamn bad at it. Their bad movies are bad in only the most boring and sad little ways and there is not a single redeeming reason to watch, discuss, or think about them ever. So naturally we decided to do all three of those things, because we're the biggest idiots of all, so here we are.

We'll forgive our good buddy Casper for appearing in this one, because from the look of his scraggly salt 'n' pepper hobo beard, he was probably eating out of dumpsters for a couple weeks before he turned up on Asylum's doorstep with a handle of Banker's Club gin and a mouthful of shoe leather[2].

Highlights include:

• 20 minutes solid of Casper pretending to fly a helicopter while the actress playing his wife pretends to scream and thrash around
• Casper, the only character in the movie, being on a first-name basis with the guy on the government weather-destroying installation
• Hot air ballooning enthusiast porn for the first 10 minutes or so (not to be confused with balloon fetish porn, hot air balloon basket fetish porn, or hot air balloon basket fetish pornaphobia)
• Watching mountain after mountain of money being shoveled into the incinerator to fuel countless variable speed swooping helicopter shots of random buildings and predictably crappy CGI weather effects

You should watch this movie if:

• You're in need of some good old-fashioned mental self-flagellation
• You work for Asylum and they're making you do it by holding your cat hostage and sending you Vines of it being killed by forgettably crappy-looking tornadoes
• You want to see a really mediocre ripoff of a ripoff of a ripoff of The Day After Tomorrow (but prepare to be even more disappointed than we told you you'd be.)

[2] And we'll forgive ourselves because we'll never do a whole review of any of their stupid movies.