If the phrase “hook echo” gives you a boner, The Day After Tomorrow is a movie tailor-made for you. For the rest of us, it’s just Independence Day with worse weather and better actors. As some sort of weather researcher, Dennis Quaid implores the world governments to do something about the current global warming situation that is melting the polar caps, certain to send the earth into a new ice age. The governments ignore his ominous threats, yet all over the world, strange phenomena of precipitation start to occur.

Although Asia initially gets some killer hail, the good ol’ USA bears the brunt of it, first with L.A. being decimated by multiple simultaneous tornadoes, and then flooding in New York City, followed by a huge temperature drop — thanks, hurricane! — that turns most of the eastern United States into an ice skating rink.

This is a great setup for a tragic disaster flick, but unfortunately, writer/director Roland Emmerich (2012), the 21st-century Irwin Allen, chooses to instead focus on Quaid’s attempts to rescue his son (Jake Gyllenhaal, Source Code) from the frozen confines of the New York Public Library. A perfectly excisable subplot has Quaid’s doctor wife Sela Ward (The Fugitive) act worried while tending to a hairless cancer-patient kid whose hands appear permanently glued to a Peter Pan hardback.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the loving father-son bond; it’s just that I don’t buy the circumstances the play out onscreen — namely, Quaid getting all his co-workers to tag along, risking their lives to walk across several state lines in sub-Arctic temperatures to retrieve someone who isn’t their own flesh and blood. I’d be like, “No thanks, boss, but you’re welcome to borrow my gloves. They’re Thinsulate!”

Some terrific effects occasionally enlighten this otherwise downbeat, underwritten and occasionally manipulative sci-fi reali-tale recommended mostly to Weather Channel geeks. —Rod Lott

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For Teenage Caveman, a remake of Roger Corman’s 1958 adventure starring Robert Vaughn, talentless pervo Kids director Larry Clark rounded up perhaps the most unappealing group of what looks like malnourished, anorexic, doped-up, but well-shampooed young adults he could unearth. These teens live in a cave in a post-apocalyptic America, but when one of them kills the sexually predatory tribal leader, they hightail it toward the ruins of Seattle, but a storm knocks them out en route.

They mysteriously wake up in their underwear, in a high-tech, 21st-century compound, having been brought there by its inhabitants, an Asian slut (Tiffany Limos, Clark’s Ken Park) and her boyfriend, Neil (Richard Hillman, Bring It On), who looks like James Van Der Beek if he were a member of the New York Dolls. From here, Clark’s waste of a film becomes the making of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, as Neil and his lady introduce the innocents to the joys of shaving your pubic region in a communal bath, snorting coke, drinking Cutty Sark by the bottle and — with detailed, hands-on instruction — having promiscuous sex.

This paradise soon sours as the kids begin dying at the hands of Neil, who is really a 120-year-old genetic freak with superheightened senses. He hulks out into a large-craniumed, hairy-chested monster who runs around in silver trousers. Thus, it’s the usual Clark film: quasi-kiddie porn with amateur acting and a shitty screenplay (“You’re a looner!” the heroine exclaims at the monster), but with the added bonus of the occasional exploding human.

Just because this is the only movie you’re likely to see where the creature flips off the “hero” and screams “You fuckin’ cunt!” before being blown to smithereens doesn’t mean you should. —Rod Lott

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In B-movie king Roger Corman’s last directorial effort to date, Frankenstein Unbound, L.A.-based scientist Dr. Buchanan (John Hurt, Alien) hits a “time slip” caused by testing his latest weapon, thus transporting him back to 19th-century Geneva, where the monstrous creature (Nick Brimble, Little John of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) created by Dr. Frankenstein (Raul Julia, The Addams Family) is running loose and killing people.

Buchanan drives around the primitive village in his computerized super car, trying to end the reign of the monster, who at one point pulls a guy’s heart out and shows it to the poor guy just before he drops dead. Somehow, Buchanan still finds time to get inside the corset of Mary Shelley (Bridget Fonda, Jackie Brown). “Percy and Byron preach free love,” she says. “I practice it.” Bo-i-i-ing!

Bizarrely, Buchanan and the monster team up to get the car in another time slip, in a scene that recalls both Back to the Future and TV’s Knight Rider. That’s kind of the uneasy mix that floats in and out of this one. Put good actors in front of Corman’s camera and his proficiency as a director can be seen. Based on the 1973 Brian Aldiss novel of the same name, Unbound is unusual, colorful and sometimes cool. Although it lags in its dream sequences, Corman’s take on the tale is better than Kenneth Branagh’s more straightforward one just a few years later. —Rod Lott

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