Dr. Evan Thorne, who has been trying to alert the authorities to the looming disaster, finds it falls to him and his friends to save this small part of the planet from an environmental apocalypse.
Jack Nicholls wrote in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, "A painfully low-budget disaster movie, Countdown: The Sky's on Fire has little to distinguish it except its lurid title.
A hole in the ozone layer above the Pacific threatens to burn to death the population of the western United States.
When this is discovered, a group of scientists, politicians, soldiers and journalists sit around and talk about fixing it while their womenfolk are threatened by insect swarms driven insane by the Sun's radiation.
As the threat to humanity is invisible, and there was little money available to show its after-effects, the film is less a bad movie than a very dull one.