Director – Nick Lyon, Screenplay – Ashley O’Neil, Producer – Anthony Fankhauser, Photography – Rafael Leyva, Music – Chris Ridenhour, Visual Effects/Animation – Dreamdust VFX, Beogra (Supervisor – Doca Mladenovic), Special Effects Supervisor – Jerry X. Buxbaum, Production Design – Yana Veselova. Production Company – CineTel Films.
Cast
Andrew Katers (Colin Prite), Alexa Mansour (Zoey), Tonya Kay (Nadia), Evan Sloan Weinstein (Jasper), Brian Krause (Danny Masters), Detra Hicks (Sarah), Kelcey Watson (Brennen), Jose Rosete (Alex), Gabriel Del Vecchio (Jack), Kris Mayeshiro (Gerry), Mark Rimer (Marty), Paige Lauren Billiott (Penelope)
Plot
Businessman Colin Prite is at the New Year’s Eve party for the start-up he runs when something happens. He comes around to find it is now one year later. Earth has been transported through a wormhole and is now located in a different star system surrounded by two suns and multiple moons. He is among a camp of survivors in the devastated ruins. He is taken out on a sortie scavenging for supplies but becomes separated from the group. Colin also has flashbacks to the New Year’s Eve party when the wormhole opened in the sky above them. Colin realises that the flashbacks he is having are interactive and that he can potentially travel back in time to the New Year’s Eve party and stop the revolutionary fuel cell that his company developed from being activated and creating the wormhole in the first place.
Earthtastrophe was one of the productions from CineTel Films, a company that has been producing horror and action films since the 1980s. During this time, CineTel have produced horror films such as 976-Evil (1988), Vampirella (1996), Beyond Loch Ness (2008), Ogre (2008) and the remake of I Spit on Your Grave (2010), among others, while the 2010s saw a move to a series of low-budget disaster and killer shark films.
Director Nick Lyon has become a specialist in low-budget genre fare, having also made the likes of Grendel (2007), Species: The Awakening (2007), Annihilation Earth (2009), Zombie Apocalypse (2011), Rise of the Zombies (2012), Foreclosed (2013), Bermuda Tentacles (2014), Hercules Reborn (2014), Stormageddon (2015), They Found Hell (2015), Isle of the Dead (2016), Shockwave (2017) and Titanic 666 (2022).
A post-apocalyptic landscape ridden by blue meteorites
By the very title, Earthtastrophe feels like one of the numerous disaster movies that CineTel has been producing usually for the Syfy Channel (where this also aired). I have a detailed list of the lengthy number of such low budget entries here with my essay Disaster Movies. However, Earthtastrophe is not quite a disaster movie, at least in the sense that the formula of these films run. These centre around the catastrophic effects of some exotic natural or human-made phenomenon going amok, the struggles as its effects are felt by assorted individuals and of the attempts to stop it. The first and third of these are present – the exceedingly exotic phenomena (Earth transported through a wormhole to a different solar system) and the efforts to reverse it. On the other hand, there are none of the scenes where the impact of the phenomenon is felt – rather Andrew Katers just wakes up one year later and finds that it is now a Post-Apocalyptic world outside.
Earthtastrophe fails to do anything interesting with this scenario. Earth is now a standard post-apocalyptic future – billions have died within the space of a year and civilisation has collapsed, while the remainder must deal with random events like frozen meteors and electrical storms, but the depiction does not go far beyond a few ruined buildings and blue meteorites periodically coming down (some cheap looking digital effects). Rather the plot focuses on an improbable time travel theory all due to the energy cell that Andrew Katers’ company developed being switched on and how to go back in time and reverse this. It is a highly unbelievable scenario and an equally unbelievable handwave solution performed to right everything back to normal.
