You know that really ridiculous scene in The Day After Tomorrow in which the characters try to outrun an incoming cold front? As if keeping 2 feet ahead of an encroaching ice patch is going to keep you out of harm's way.

Yeah well, Absolute Zero is like a 90-minute version of that one sequence. Only it's a lot, lot stupider.

Digging the bottom of the made-for-TV-disaster-movie barrel, the fine folks at Marvista entertainment have cobbled together a feature-length sleeping pill that makes 10.5 Apocalypse look like The 10.5 Commandments. Absolute Zero opens with a scene in which one scientist is sucked into a massive (and growing) glacier crevasse ... and the rest of the other scientists just stand there and watch. And things get even dumber from there.

B-movie staple Jeff Fahey plays The Doctor They Didn't Listen To, while former Playboy Bunny Erika Eleniak gets to archaeologist / geologist / whatever. Ah, and as lame screenplays often do, Absolute Zero offers a limp and flimsy subplot in which this pair of ineffectual whiners has some sort of spotty romantic history. So five points to whomever can guess what happens to Ms. Blondie's husband at the beginning of Act III.

The plot is this: Global warming has initiated a sudden switch in Earth's polarity. Or something vaguely related to that kind of TV-movie fake-science gobbledygook. All you need to know is that Florida is sitting right where a new ice age wants to settle in, and it's up to Jeff Fahey, Erika Eleniak, and a pair of horny college kids to ... to what? TO save millions of Floridians from a frozen death?

No, the goal of Absolute Zero is for the main characters to lock themselves into a vault. Seriously. And once you get a load of the "tv news" epilogue that explains what went down in the movie's curiously absent climax, you simply won't believe you sat through all 90 minutes of Absolute Zero for such a ridiculously inadequate finalé.

Not that the first 80 minutes were all that hot either.

The DVD

Video: The widescreen transfer looks as good as the flick did when it played on the Hallmark Channel or whatever network it is that swallows up these brain-dead productions and comes up asking for more.

Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 no-frills. Adequate, period.

Extras: Zilch.

I've always had a soft spot for B-level disaster movies, but Absolute Zero is so silly, so wooden, and so stunningly inert -- I'm kinda surprised it didn't launch a new TV series.