Tornado Valley

Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but not every movie has to have state of the art visual effects for me to enjoy it. So they don't destroy L.A., or the planet, but the characters are well drawn, good acting, and it is an enjoyable film. Want a gory disaster film? Watch something else. Want a nice movie? Watch this.

I'll give this one a (huh?) out of ten.

In terms of plot, we have another Twister clone, only without the budget, and without the F/X, and apparently without a screenwriter who's seen the last 17 Twister clones already made. Compared to most Lifetime fare, Tornado Valley really doesn't stand out from the pack, good or bad. It's a bland, formulaic, run of the mill childhood tragedy, adult baggage, dysfunctional family flick that keeps Hallmark and Lifetime from being 24 hour infomercial channels.

Now for the good stuff. We have the Storm Protection Center in Norman, Oklahoma (in reality, the Storm Prediction Center in Norman), a name which got some giggles from me. What, they have a national storm shelter in Norman? "Hey, there's a bad storm, let's head up the Storm Protection Center."

Then there's Matilda, a device that looks like a plasma globe from Spencer's Gifts at the mall, which can not only help with predicting when and where tornadoes will, but will also prevent "billions of dollars in collateral damage". Huh? So, I'm to believe that Matilda can teleport crops, forests, and office buildings out of the path of a tornado? Maybe it's the funky patterns in Matilda's plasma globe that will distract the tornado from hitting people and buildings?

Remember to keep an eye out for the eco-nadoes. No trees, grass, or small forest animals were injured in the making of Tornado Valley, because these tornadoes only eat humans, houses, and tractors, refuse to drop any hail or rain, and are only slightly windier than a ceiling fan. Could be Matilda working subtly from the start...

If you took out the storm aspect of this movie, you'd end up with a pretty good American pastoral family movie. The acting is pretty decent, and the storyline interesting. However, this movie appears to be marketed as a weather thriller, which it is not. The climactic scene takes a total of 5 minutes of the movie.

I can't say that this film is actually "awful." It's just not very good. There's not as much action as you might expect and the CGI tornadoes are pretty weak. (Everybody stands around in bright sunlight and a little wind comes up. The next thing you know, a tornado funnel that appears to be about 20' across just drops down into the meadow and pulls somebody away...very slowly. There's no sense of collateral damage, ferocious winds, or even darkened skies. No rain, hail, or flying debris. It's sort of a four-year-old's conception of a tornado.)

This would be bad enough, but the "family story" side of it is also pretty maudlin. I don't know who originally broadcast this, but I'm guessing it was the Hallmark Channel. Absolutely no bite to it.

Definitely not worth your time.

A few partial nods to twister with story elements. Very cheap and crappy effects twister scenes might account for 5 mins they seem to have spent more money on the command center tech than they did the CGI. Good looking cast decent story line (family drama). I only gave it a 4 for the drama this is not a twister film. You spend more time looking at people looking at monitors and the sky talking about the coming system.