Nature Unleashed: Tornado

The movie opens with a stupid guy chaining himself to a not-so-sturdy backyard appliance so he can make a home-movie doco of a CGI tornado roaring by without getting blown away himself. The winds are clearly blowing his hair *sideways*, yet he's magically getting pulled straight *upwards* (clue numero uno that this movie is gonna suck bigtime ... as if it being a "SciFi original" Saturday Nite feature wasn't a big enough tip-off). Suddenly, a shot rang out. The wife screamed. The family dog peed on the rug. And Mr. Tornado Paparazzo gets his chain yanked and gets sucked into the whirling vortex of suckiness that is this movie.

Next, we cut to a scene in which his now grown-up son is himself a professional photog, covering some completely-out-of-left-field story about Gypsies (whoops, sorry, the PC term is "The Roma") being victims of discrimination in ... New Jersey. Thus completely sending the What-the-F***-o-Meter off the scale. And unbelievable as it might seem, the movie (and I use the term very, very loosely) manages to go downhill from there.

Perhaps the only remotely interesting thing about this bizarre mishmash of the meteorological and Roma-nesque is that it stars Swiss hunk-o-cheese Daniel Bernhardt, who played Agent Johnson in The Matrix Reloaded (2003), but who is much better known to Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans for his brilliant portrayal of The Runaway karate-foo guy in Future War. ("Well, it's not really the Future and we didn't have the budget to do a War, but we did rent a whole bunch of these empty cardboard boxes for Dan to get thrown through during the fight scenes...") Wow - if I could give this one negative stars (Note to IMDb - we need black holes!) I would. About the only not-explicitly-bad thing I can say about this one is: it's a worthy sequel to "Fire: Nature Unleashed (2004)." (Well, it's not really worthy, and it's not really a sequel, but the titles *are* similar.)

After watching the death of his father by a deadly tornado, Josh Pallady (Daniel Bernhardt) is left with just a necklace or medallion of some kind to remember him by. Due to chance, Josh is sent to Romania to film a press conference & some kind of gypsy rituals. This is where he meets Irena (Anya Lahiri), a gypsy woman who reads tarot cards. Irena quickly identifies the necklace as the Talisman.

The Talisman, as the story goes, was given by the angel Gabriel to a king and would be handed down to the "chosen one", who would save the gypsies from the wind. This is pretty much when the movie went south.

The acting by everyone involved is pretty bad, terrible even, but at least Anya Lahiri was something nice to look at. Her acting was not as bad as the other main characters, either. This is not saying much, but she was probably the best actor/actress in the movie.

Plotwise, the movie would have been better with just the tornadoes & the tornado chasing scenes. The whole thing could have done without the satanic cult subplot. I do not really see where that fits into a movie titled "Tornado". Anyhow, if it was not for some decent looking tornado effects, which is why I wanted to watch this, I would have rated it lower. As it stands I leave it a 3/10.

I don't believe the term "spoilers" applies to this film. Whatever you could hear about the film before seeing it would not "spoil" your experience, because you'll have a bad one no matter what.

This film is so bad you can't even laugh about it. It doesn't have the charm of bad gore movies, it doesn't have any charm, actually.

The acting is more than bad, whoever decided to cast Daniel Bernhardt as Josh Pallady should be hit repeatedly with something cold and wet. He couldn't act his way out of a wet paper bag.

The script must have been written in less than 24 hours by some kid who's read too many occult books. All the symbols are connected in this movie in such a stupid way.

You would expect something about tornadoes, but they only play a small part, it's mostly occult gibberish intertwined with stereotypes (boy travels with girl, girl can't stand him, boy goes to have dinner with other girl, the first girl gets jealous kind of thing) the number 666, devil worshipers, talismans, gypsies telling fortunes, insane asylum...

Seriously everything that's been overdone in the history of cinema and literature is being shown in this movie.

It's so bad, i can't even start to describe it. It still amazes me how producers read the synopsis and said, "Yes, we'll buy it." Why???! I really recommend NEVER seeing that piece of cinematic garbage. If you have to decide between watching this on TV or spending an evening looking at the paint peeling from your walls, I seriously recommend the latter.

If you hear of this movie, and all the others in this series (Volcano, Earthquake, Fire), RUN AWAY!!!

This film was terrible. I almost couldn't believe that Sci Fi was actually airing this garbage. The plot/storyline is bad, the acting is pretty bad, and the special effects (the tornadoes, clouds, etc.) are extremely bad and look very fake. I personally think that I could've done better, more realistic-looking special effects than the people that made this movie. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING??????!!!!!! The opening scene is actually the best part of the whole movie, and that is not saying very much. It's still bad. I thought that the rest of the movie couldn't possibly be any worse; IT WAS!!! (i.e. It started off bad and went downhill from there.) Don't even waste your time watching this movie. Pass it up.

I also want to say that the other movies in the "Nature Unleashed" series are also pretty bad. Pass them up, too.

My expectations were pretty low already, but I was expecting it to have some essence of fun. Nature Unleashed: Tornado doesn't even have that. There is nothing good about the movie at all, so much so that you get no novelty value whatsoever, only hair-ripping-worthy frustration. Where to begin? Well, Nature Unleashed: Tornado is incredibly cheap to look at for starters with hackneyed editing, which was a big part of why the dream sequence was as disastrous as it was, and some of the worst CGI effects I've ever seen. The music is generic, nothing's memorable and it's never exciting in tempo. The script is both cheesy and aimless, the complete opposite of what a good script should be and the characters are unlikeably clichéd with the gypsies very negatively exploited. The acting is terrible with nobody standing out or giving a good performance. But the worst asset has to be the story, it is so dull and incomprehensible that you actually wonder if there's a story at all, and there are no suspense, tension or thrills whatsoever. Overall, an embarrassing film, even for low-budget, with no redeeming qualities. 0/10 Bethany Cox