Category 6: Day of Destruction

Average film. Very routine formula film about a disaster.

There a few things going for it, and a few things against it.

Against it are the settings. Too many city shots, with buildings, motor vehicles, people in suits and ties, all that which makes for dull spectacle. There are some very trite situations, the young lady not taken seriously by a trite bespectacled wimp, the fascination with computers, the power plays that bore most people, the predictable outcome of the storm chasing moron.

For it, while the characters at first begin to sink into stereotypes, each one is brought out with at least one saving grace. Not sure if this saves the film, but it does show some semblance of style and intent to keep it from being too silly. We aren't left with too many predictable and trite results, and it still has entertainment value.

CATEGORY 6 can readily be summed up by pointing out that it was shot in Canada, although it is set in Chicago. An aging Brian Dennehy leads a huge cast in this badly made disaster flick as huge storms head for Chicago and a hacker brings Chi-town to its knees, power-wise. Dennehy is OK even though he is clearly just collecting a paycheck. Thomas Gibson of "Criminal Minds" mumbles his way through as the TV movie's secondary lead. And Randy Quaid plays a colorful tornado chaser who is a near-duplicate of his character in "Independence Day." The film is talky and tedious, and the effects are on a high school level. There's even stock footage that doesn't match particularly well with the locale (palm trees, anyone?) I managed to sit through most of this before finally giving up.

Come on you guys--it's a dandy no brainer. Let yourself go. It's quite a ride. I loved the veiled references to George W. by Secretary Abbott and her assistant. Let business run riot and we get Enrons and all kinds of devious stuff. And regardless of John Stossel, the government is the only control we've got. A big part of any story is the actor's performances which I thought were quite well done. Some of the dialogue was corny but I imagine in the same circumstances it would be hard to come up with award winning comments. And that's part of the humanity of any story like this. I'm just mad that they had led me to believe that a flood was one of the results of the storm coming from the North and there was none. I wanted to see how they could get out of the many advices for citizens to head for secure main floors and basements with the flood coming. So they just chickened out.

I'm a bit of a disaster movie junkie. I just can't miss a film, no matter how bad it looks to be, as long as it promises some kind of cinematic carnage. I've sat through 'Night of the Twisters,' survived 'Atomic Twister,' and laughed all the way through '10.5' But 'Category 6: Day of Destruction' hits new lows. The computer graphics were so poor as to be embarrassing even for what you'd expect from a 'made for television' piece of crap. But it was the onslaught of every cliché in the book that really got to me, from the adulterous husband, the weather man who feels guilt over a past failure, the evil corporate guy, and to top it all off they gives us the pregnant lady in an elevator schtick…I'm mean PLEASE!

With all that said I'me already set to record part two. It's possible that I need help, or maybe an intervention.

Okay, so I enjoy a romp through destruction now and then - I'll admit it, I'm a disaster movie fan. That is, when the movie is ABOUT a disaster, NOT when the movie itself IS a disaster - BIG DIFFERENCE! My husband and I almost turned this off after the first hour of the first night, but decided to stick it out to see some potentially cool special effects. Okay, we got those. And then we felt compelled to watch the conclusion on Wednesday. Sloooooooooow. Boooooooooring. Not to mention stupid! I was pretty willing to overlook the paper-thin characters, lame dialogue, and clichéd, disjointed plotting. I was even mildly willing to overlook the damage done to the anti-global-warming cause. But in a movie where obviously somebody had enough computer smarts to give a realistic facsimile of the St. Louis Arch twisting and shouting, why wasn't there an equally savvy computer geek on hand to EDIT OUT THE PALM TREES from the stock footage dubbed in as "hurricane hits Chicago?" HELLO ALL YOU ON THE WEST COAST - last time I checked, Chicago was still located in the Midwest (you know, that "fly-over" country that produces most of YOUR food???), and guess what? There are no palm trees in the Midwest. SURPRISE!