Tornado!

Tornado!...

...you know, I really hate it when movie names have exclamation points in the titles. Like, what's the point? To add emphasis, to make it pop more? Is the audience member reading the VHS cover supposed to shout it in order to pronounce it properly? No, it's not pronounced "tornado", it's "TORNADO!!!", at the top of your lungs. Though, I think the proper reason as to why an exclamation point is in the title is to symbolize the shock of a tornado finally appearing in this film. You're sitting through this plaintive film that slithers at a snails pace, and you're sitting on the couch with your shirt off playing Angry Birds because there's absolutely nothing remotely interesting occurring on screen, and FINALLY a tornado shows up. So, it's like "hey, a Tornado!" because it's such a shock that a tornado finally appears in a film called Tornado!. Exclamation point, period? How do I write that? "!." or just "!" since it's the end of the sentence? See, it's just stupid.

Tornado(!) is a 1996 TV movie meant to blatantly cash in and rip off Twister, which came out two weeks before this film premiered. It happens to actually star some notable people, like Bruce Campbell, Ernie Hudson, and LQ Jones, among others. There have been some internet testimonies of people claiming this film actually played in some theaters, but it's never officially been confirmed and I dread anyone who paid money to watch this on the big screen. For people who hated Twister, I dare you to watch Tornado!. Its biggest flaw is that it's dull. So, so dull. Every time you think a tornado is about to appear, it just cuts to black and opens up to the next day. You're sitting at the edge of your seat, finally relieved that something is about to happen...and then it just cuts to somewhere else. It's basically the proto-Godzilla (2014) about 20 years earlier. In all actuality, there's only about 10 seconds of on-screen tornado action occurring in this film, and most of it can be seen in the trailer. For the remaining 89 minutes and 50 seconds, it's nothing but bad dialog and people doing nothing. It gets excruciating and torturous within 30 minutes. Even when the tornado is right in front of our characters, the camera doesn't pan around to let the audience see it; we just hear sounds of destruction and our casts' shocked expressions. I understand that the film is low budget, but filmmakers need to understand that they can't tease an audience with something they don't have the money to afford showing. Not even legendary coolmeisters like Bruce Campbell and Ernie Hudson can sweettalk this film to make it more bearable. Instead, they too just sit around waiting for a tornado to appear. Not surprisingly, the most interesting sequence is the one moment where we actually see the tornado as it wrecks havoc on a small town.

I hear people all the time exclaiming how Twister is such an awful film, and it really makes me wish they'd see this. Watching Twister after this will make the latter seem like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Twister may be dumb, but at least it's fun and spends about 90% of its runtime with cool tornado-related action sequences, and at least the characters do more than just talk about boring stuff. Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt's writing may get annoying, but at least they actually do stuff. Wanna see Bruce Campbell get a haircut? Wanna see Ernie Hudson watch TV? Wanna see Bruce Campbell driving while nothing is happening? Wanna sit around for 90 minutes waiting for a Tornado to appear? Well, Tornado! may be the film for you. The sad thing is that Tornado! isn't even the worst tornado film. Atomic Twister, Nature Unleashed: Tornado, Storm Cell, Storm Chasers: Revenge Of The Twisters, and Devil Winds are all much worse than Tornado!, and that's extremely unsettling because this is a bad, bad movie.

I was surprised by this movie. Don't get me wrong...this movie is no academy award winner, but it's better (more accurate) than Twister, which had to have the bigger budget by far. There actually was a device that was used by tornado researchers a while ago, called Toto I think, like the device that's in the movie. I don't think that it ever actually came in contact with a tornado though. I was also surprised at how the National Weather Service was portrayed in the movie. They (in particular SPC, which is actually the Storm Prediction Center) seem very inept and ineffective, which is an unfair portrait. The acronym "SPC" is never actually defined in the movie either, I don't think, which is strange considering that I think most people wouldn't know what SPC was. The ending of the movie is a little hokey, but this movie was a lot better than I thought it was going to be.

Sam Callen (Shannon Sturges from the TV series Savannah) gets sent to Texas to basically shut down Dr. Branson's tornado tracking machine project and gives him a few days to come up with some results for him to be able to continue his project while she gets romanced by Jake (Bruce Campbell), a tornado chasing cowboy and farmer, who lives with his grandfather and occasionally comes to blows with his highschool rival Ritchie Cochran, an ambitious TV weather man, who shows interest in Sam as well. Sam decides to stay on a little longer so she can experience a tornado unaware it's a monster tornado.

Twister was better since that was a box office movie. Bruce Campbell was quite cool in this movie, even though this movie had no real effects it is still worth a watch. I rate this 6/10.

i'll start with the positives.i really like the characters that Bruce Campbell and Ernie Hudson played.they were both very likable.Bruce Campbell did a very good job in his role as a storm chaser.not once did i think of him in his Evil Dead persona.Ernie Hudson was also credible in his role as a scientist who had been trying for years to perfect an early warning system he had developed.other than that,there is not a lot to recommend this movie.we see very few tornadoes in the movie.it is more of a drama than anything else.it was boring at times,to say the least.of far as these types of movies go,this one is very low key and sedate at times.there is also nothing original in it.you basically have the same bunch of characters,just with different names.it passes the time,but that's about it.4/10

Get real. Any movie starring Bruce Campbell is expected to be a B-movie. The COOL thing about that here is that instead of its counterpart, Twister, they decided on something that looked real, rather than something that looked exciting. I haven't seen Twister since I saw it in the theater. It blew, and I didn't give a crap about any of the characters or the story. As far as I'm concerned, THEY ripped THIS off, and made it a "sensation" of CGI crap. The characters are more believable, as are the effects and the story. I may have rated this a 6, but Twister is about a 2...and only because of the flying cow and Bill Paxton is it not a 1.