Meltdown: Days of Destruction

MELTDOWN: DAYS OF DESTRUCTION, a would-be TV disaster movie from 2006, is only worth watching if you're wondering what happened to Casper Van Dien's career after STARSHIP TROOPERS (answer: not a lot). It's essentially a heatwave-based thriller, featuring some science guff about an asteroid passing close to the Earth causing our planet to move closer to the sun.

What it all boils down to is a kind of road/post-apocalypse movie, as Van Dien and his colleagues/friends and family are forced to try to get to a place of safety while contending with intense temperatures. Strangely, despite the supposed heatwave, most of the characters continue to wear long shirts and/or jackets - at least the cult '60s flick NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT made the effort of making the protagonists look all sweaty and dishevelled!

Given the poverty-row budget, most of the threat comes from various looters and bad guys, and it's all done in a gung ho fashion and fairly well paced. But the writing is predictable and the characters non-existent, with none of the cast making much of an impact. About the only scene in the film I enjoyed was the bit with the exploding cars, which was novel; the rest is merely humdrum.