BMovieMogul

Anyone who complains about Peter Jackson making movies too long should sit through this CBS "event". There's about 45 minutes of story padded by 2 hours of unnecessary subplots, featuring bland by-the-book TV drama clichés. Bad science is a staple for crappy weather disaster movies, so I'm not going to complain about that. Silly science can be fun to watch if it's executed in an amusing fashion. What kills this movie is it's 10 subplots... all of which could be excised without destroying what is supposed to be the central plot. The one character that is entertaining to watch in Category 6 is Tornado Tommy, despite being a very annoying stereotype.

Note that I also didn't bother commenting on special effects. Their quality should come as no surprise.

Not recommended.

A few years ago, I was shown a high school movie shot with a group of friends, a VHS camcorder, and no money. Same genre. This movie is on par with that. I'm actually impressed that every "actor" in this movie could deliver the ridiculously flourished lines from the script with straight faces. That's not to say that they had any talent either. I was either laughing or banging my head against the wall throughout. I particularly enjoyed watching the villain who reminded me more of a TV evangelist than a wizard. I half expected him to deliver a sermon before unleashing the ultimate evil upon the world. Of course, having past experience with Fred Olen Ray, I knew what to expect. So I can't really say I was disappointed. It's funny to see the exact same "Planet of Dinosaurs" stock footage that he used in a prior movie, "Phantom Empire".

This movie scrapes the bottom of the sword and sorcery barrel, but manages to be hilarious in it's ineptitude. Recommended for MiSTies.

This one hurt. And I'm usually a sucker for really bad Twister ripoffs made for cable. We've seen this plot before, twice. Estranged parent-child relationship, because said parent is too devoted to chasing that big storm. Parent is obsessed with storms because of a tragedy in their childhood. Parent predicts The Big One will hit right where estranged child lives. Child doesn't believe them. Child has has several tense emo moments with parent. Big tornado predictably hits, key characters survive, and everyone is happy. See "Devil Winds" and "Tornado Warning" for this by -the-numbers plot as well. Amusingly, they use global warming for an excuse to "move" Tornado Alley to the pacific northwest so they could shoot cheaply in Vancouver. As expected, the tornado effects are lackluster. The CGI crew just rendered the same tornado for every scene. I think what really got to me was the darkness of the movie. By that I do not mean a grim undertone to the story... but rather how literally dark the image was throughout. I spent a lot of time straining to make out various details like character faces and locales. The environment around a tornado can be very dark, but this was done throughout the movie. I can only recommend this to people who didn't think it could get any worse than Atomic Twister.