Unless you spent your holiday season in a foxhole in Afghanistan or in bed with a supermodel, you have no excuse for not knowing what the ‘polar vortex’ is: a scary-sounding name for it being very cold in January in most of the United States. News media around the world have been throwing an ice-bukkake party with footage and photos that make most of the lower forty-eight look like Narnia. I submit Exhibit A: ‘The Polar Vortex: A Dispatch from the Deep Freeze‘ (The Telegraph, 11 January 2014).

Given our passion for slightly late topical news items and top ten lists here at Movie-Moron, we want to ring in 2014 with something everybody can relate to: sh*tty weather.

So without further ado, here it is: the Top 10 Movies With Worse Weather Than The Polar Vortex.

10. The Day After Tomorrow

Let’s face it. You knew this was coming, which is why I wanted to get it out of the way first. Also, I’m not the only person to see the similarities between an American city under inches of thick ice and, well, an American city under inches of thick ice.

The Day After Tomorrow is actually based on a book called The Coming Global Superstorm co-authored by everyone’s favourite alien abductee Whitley Strieber. You may remember him as the author of Communion, a ‘true story’ which was adapted for the screen as a harrowing love story between Christopher Walken and an anal probe.

Clearly Roland Emmerich likes to draw inspiration from books with an edgier storylines. 10,000 BC wouldn’t have existed without Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods and don’t even get me started on Stargate, which relies heftily on the writing of Zechariah Sitchin. Strieber’s Global Superstorm book (co-authored with radio personality and paranormal enthusiast Art Bell) is a logical choice for Emmerich, and if the bullet points on the book’s Wikipedia page are an accurate summary, holds worrying predictions for the climate future of our planet.

The scene I’ve chosen here to illustrate my point might not have the most extensive effects or necessarily the worst weather, but Tokyo Hail Storm would make an amazing name for a Japanese metal band, so really I’m just planting seeds.

Weather Forecast: Ice from the sky.

9. The Core

I love this film. I love it and I won’t hear a bad word about it. It’s so good that James Cameron stole the name of the element they invented in the script and put it in Avatar (yes, sports fans, Cameron lifted the name for ‘unobtainium’ just like he lifted the plot for The Terminator). Aaron Eckhart plays the brilliant scientist who figures out that the end of the world is literally nigh: the earth’s molten core has stopped spinning and funky things start happening to the planet. It’s up to him, the million-dollar baby Hilary Swank, the always-amazing-as-an-asshole Stanley Tucci and Delroy Lindo (along with Bruce Greenwood and Tcheky Karyo for once not playing a psychopath) to save the world by drilling down to the core and detonating a nuclear bomb to re-start it. Daft? Yes. High concept? You betcha. Awesome? Totally.

In a twist, we also find out that the devious Stanley Tucci and the US military (is there anything they don’t f*ck up?) may have caused the problem in the first place by building a doomsday weapon under the name Project Destiny. So, not unlike The Day After Tomorrow, one undercurrent in the film is that the whole disaster is really our fault. You may notice that this theme crops up a few more times but I’ll say no more about it because this isn’t a thesis.

Here’s an example of the serious side effects that come with the earth’s core stopping, at least according to Hollywood. See if you can spot the blink-and-you’ll-miss-him appearance of Dr. Jeffrey Steadman from Scrubs who was an unbelievably annoying tool.

Weather Forecast: Fire from the sky.

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