Good start, but then it gets ruined

Fantastic!

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

This one stank worse than the bathrooms in the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Just have a few questions here and yes, there are spoilers with them so, let's get started. Question 1 as the Mayan culture died out in South America would it not be impossible for both The of that culture's bloodline and all of the Rings to wind up in the same location, in North America? What are the odds of that happening? Question 2, on the mountain why did the steam dissolve Mr. Kane however Jaycee and her father had been hit by numerous steam eruptions and came through completely unscathed? Perhaps they had Nomex underwear. Question 3 with the laser-guided stalagmites why is it that no one in this town appears bright enough to get inside? Question 4 when Mary was summoned by the sheriff to the accident site on the road, no other passerbyers, no cops, no other anybody was present at the accident. There should have been someone there who made the phone call to 911 but likely they had something else to do. And in that regard, why did Mary not even check on the other victim in the overturned vehicle? Is it possible that it was that second person in the other car who made the phone call and was just in such a hurry they decided to walk into town? Or could it have been the man in the grassy knoll with the rifle? Question 5, how did this Mayan civilization thousands of years ago hide a ring in a mine that did not exist or would not exist for a thousand years? I'm guessing these guys were good! And Question Number 6 (my personal favorite) is how in perdition's flames did Kane, Mary, Jaycee, and everybody else involved in this fiasco in between make it through the impenetrable barrier of cursed Mayan energy to get to the mine, Grant's cabin, the mountain trail, the ranger station, the Christmas Farm and find the Rings? All of these locales we're outside of the town, you know that place with the impenetrable Death Dome that's sealed everyone inside?Seriously, who writes this stuff?? Did they have a day off from KinderCare and did it in between recess and lunch period? It's like they're not even trying anymore.

The 12 Disasters of Christmas is a Christmas-themed disaster movie from the SyFy Channel that attempts to emulate the same kind of Mayan prophecy disaster nonsense as in the big bucks Hollywood movie 2012. Except, of course, the filmmakers have a budget of about $3.60, so attempting to convey world-scale events on a tiny budget was always going to be a challenge. No surprise that they make a pig's ear of it.This Canadian movie was helmed by Steven R. Monroe, no stranger to the B-movie genre having already made the likes of ICE TWISTERS and the I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE remake. Religious nonsense provides a backdrop to the otherwise familiar action, which sees a family trio pursued by twelve different disasters: they are forced to flee from freezing ground, invisible force fields, icicle showers, and other assorted mayhem. None of it makes much sense and it goes without saying that the CGI effects are so utterly poor as to be completely laughable.Another laughable element of the film is to have the annoying female teen protagonist called Jacey and her parents Joseph and Mary. I suppose the scriptwriters thought this amounted to wit but they were mistaken, it's just very silly. The stuff with the magic ring seems to have been borrowed from THE LORD OF THE RINGS but inevitably given the low budget, the climax is based around human drama and betrayal rather than anything requiring money. Yes, it's dreadful.

I actually aim to be encouraging to be encouraging towards films with my comments, summaries and ratings, but only ones that really deserve it. The 12 Disasters of Christmas doesn't deserve it for me, it is one of those movies where a movie title is spot on in summing up the quality of the film. The 12 Disasters are not of Christmas or the disasters depicted in the movie to me, more like the 12 main disasters that contribute to the overall disaster that is this movie. List of disasters in regard to this regard(in no particular order): Disaster #1- In regard to the special effects I wasn't expecting great ones considering the term low-budget. I did want to see some kind of effort, which is not what I got with The 12 Disasters of Christmas. These ones look really cheap and perhaps even unfinished, again not unexpected, but seriously these are among the worst I've seen in a while.Disaster #2- The editing is very choppy. It does little to make the scenery and such interesting or striking to look at. But it also manages to actually make the effects even cheaper than they already are.Disaster #3- All of the acting is poor. Everybody seems really bland, the very worst could be described as non-existent, and never once is there a sense of genuine peril or terror.Disaster #4- A complete lack of atmosphere. Any scenes that mean to indicate any signs of suspense or a sense of genuine horror at the perilous predicaments fail completely.Disaster #5- Which leads directly onto the story. Pacing-wise you know a film is dull when nothing compelling of the kind happens. To further disadvantage things, there is also nothing that comes across as a surprise, it is riddled with predictability that you know exactly what is going to happen throughout. It also suffers from taking itself far too seriously.Disaster #6- There is some really awful writing in The 12 Disasters of Christmas. The whole dialogue throughout the entire movie is awkward and cheesy, and made even worse by the uninvolved line delivery of the actors. There are also far too many biblical references and names that are both poorly placed and very poorly researched.Disaster #7- If you are looking for any likable characters, don't look for them here. And let's forget for a moment that the characters and many of the situations are clumsy and overused stereotypes. These characters are either obnoxious or non-descript and are nowhere near developed enough. Consequently I didn't care for them or their situation at all.Disaster #8- Coming from somebody who has started a degree in music(vocal studies to be exact), I always do look for good music. And was the music good here? Not to me it wasn't. It wasn't the case for me of it being badly composed, it just came across as generic with a sluggish tempo, making the movie even duller for my tastes.Disaster #9- With low-budget disaster movies and if you have seen enough, you are probably accustomed to some questionable science and geography. But you will be in for a shock at how many of these errors there are in The 12 Disasters of Christmas and how pushed to the limit of stupidity they are brought to.Disaster #10- Likewise with the music, this movie has some lame sound effects as well. More often they are overbearing and bizarre even, but what is even more frustrating is that the suspense is partly ruined by the sound effects literally sounding out whether something bad or out of the ordinary is going to happen.Disaster #11- The directing feels very flat here, breathing no life or energy to the proceedings. There is no sense of individual style or feel of the disaster movie genre as well.Disaster #12- Bad pacing, it's all very leaden and lifeless, so everything underwhelms whereas it should thrill or shock.So in conclusion, disastrous. If you do decide to see this movie, do make sure that you do watch it before Christmas(despite the title), otherwise you'll find yourself a Scrooge overnight. 0/10 Bethany Cox

Please do not consider wasting two whole hours of your life on this turd, possibly hoping (as I did) that it will fall into that 'so bad it's good' territory. This movie was so awful it skipped that category altogether and went straight into the land of 'forgettable and generic'. I'll try and go through methodically rather than just wax annoyed about this Syfy dud: PLOT/STORY- The film is a doomsday sci-fi story set in a small Northern town and based on the premise that the Mayans predicted the end times and then warned us using coded messages in the song "The 12 Days of Christmas." Yes, really, the one with the French hens. The writers waste no time in flinging far-fetched and mostly unexplained disasters at the characters, from hilariously fatal icicles to hurricanes to the dreaded Jello Sky only previously seen in Ghostbusters II. The characters are incredibly cartoonish (soulless corporate goons, rebellious teen girls, religious fruitcakes, the gang's all here!) and the writing is so weak in parts it is embarrassing to watch actual grown-ups act out clunky dialogue and a confusing narrative a fourth grader may as well have written. Which brings me to my next point.ACTING- The film hangs its hat primarily on Jacey, a young girl with special powers, and her father, as they go through tired heroics trying to decipher a book of Mayan cartoons, save the world, and repair their strained relationship, natch. The actors here do little more than act as cardboard stand-ins for characters so flat and incomplete even THEY don't seem to believe them. I wasn't convinced that any of the people were in even the slightest bit of peril (and trust me, peril comes at every character from all sides) other than perhaps the dog, which had the good sense to leave early on before things got so bad that I had second-hand embarrassment for anyone who appeared on screen. Without spoiling anything, suffice to say that the best bits of acting (and I use that term loosely) are generally the people who display expressions of actual horror- as opposed to boredom- before they are dispatched of violently by the doom du jour.MUSIC AND SOUND FX- Nothing special to see here; the film carries your typical Asylum-quality generic music tracks to try and amp up whatever terror or concern we're intended to feel, although I must say that occasionally you get a satisfying crunch or rip whenever a hapless townsperson is brutally killed because the Mayans got their panties in a bunch and we didn't pay enough attention to a Christmas song....In closing, yeah, it was just that bad. Also, here's a parting thought: we're meant to buy that Jacey and her family are descended from Mayan prophets, and their pale-Caucasian-small-Northern-town-ishness is hand waved by the resident Smart Theory Guy by simply saying that thousands of years of intermarrying with Europeans has made them not remotely Hispanic. Seeing as how there are still Maya peoples (an ethnic group) alive today in Mexico and Central America, isn't this kind of racist or at best, wildly ignorant? I kind of hope so because it gives me one more thing I can complain about with this movie. After giving my two hours I feel I've earned as much. Don't make the same mistake I did, folks.