Today was going to be MonTuesday, but I think I'll have to just have a big MonTueWednesday tomorrow. I have this bad habit of getting sick after stressful or tiring times, so it seems that the allergy attack over the weekend was a harbinger of something worse and as soon as the stress eased, the worse hit. I decided it was in my best interest to spend the day with cold medicine, hot tea and a book.
Since I wasn't up to doing much else, last night I decided to do an Evil Snowglobe Double Feature. I re-watched the Haven Christmas episode, where the snowglobe wasn't exactly evil but it did do some terrible things to the town, and then I watched the Saturday-night movie I'd taped, Snowmageddon, which was about an evil snowglobe trying to destroy a town. In short, having a snowglobe of your town is a very bad thing. Snowmageddon was awesome in its utter silliness. I got the feeling that the script was a result of locking a writer in a room and saying, "Okay, your writing prompt is 'evil snowglobe.' Now, you have two hours to write a movie," and then they went with whatever got written, with no revisions.
The movie made no sense whatsoever. Our generic nuclear family in a small town in Alaska finds a mysterious Christmas present on their porch, and they think it's from a neighbor. The box contains a beautifully crafted, kind of steampunky snowglobe of the town. Their young son starts playing with it, which sets off all the steampunky gears. Soon, a mysterious crack opens in the ground in the middle of town, which sets off a chain reaction of disasters. The kid notices a similar crack in the ground in the snowglobe and starts to suspect something is going on, but everyone thinks he has an overactive imagination because he likes to play fantasy games. Then the next day, when something else sets off the snow globe, a terrible storm comes up that involves ice missiles shooting from the clouds. Yes, ice missiles! It was worse than a Texas hail storm. Then there was the avalanche. Of course, there's the screaming, useless teenage girl trapped on the mountain during all this. Eventually, they start to believe the kid, mostly because the clock on the town hall has started working again -- in spite of all its workings having been removed years ago -- and it shows the same time as the clock on the town hall in the snowglobe. And then it doesn't seem to matter what happens to the snowglobe because disasters hit at the top of every hour, and these include giant spikes coming out of the ground. The kid, who has read fantasy novels and knows how these things work, suggests throwing the thing into a volcano to destroy it, and wouldn't you know, one of the disasters is that the nearby dormant volcano mountain becomes active again, which makes that solution a lot more viable.
The thing is, they never bother figuring out what the deal with the snowglobe is -- what it is, how it works, why it works, who sent it and why, etc. It just shows up, horrible things happen, and then they throw it into a crevasse full of molten lava, the end. Whoever gave the snowglobe doesn't do anything to stop them from destroying it, and that person is presumably still out there. There's also no character growth or any character arcs -- heroic dad is still heroic at the end, screaming teenager is still screaming at the end, no one learns A Valuable Lesson, no one falls in love, no one even realizes just how heroic they really can be. But still, ICE MISSILES!!!! SHOOTING FROM THE CLOUDS!!!! If there were Gremlins riding those missiles, it would be the best Christmas movie ever!
I had no idea that there was so much world domination potential in snowglobes. I need to start collecting those things. Oh, wait, I have a snowglobe from a client event where you can put in your own picture and make it a snowglobe of anyone or any place you like. That should make me invincible! Kneel before me, peasants, or face my wrath!
Ahem. I did mention I'm on cold medicine, right?
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