Cyclone

Having seen this film twice now - which some might find unbelievable or even masochistic - I felt I had to comment on it. It's easy to pan. The music is cheesy. In fact, as my wife suggested, it sounds like a porn flick. The dialog is downright juvenile if not stupid. Its runtime is way too long. I could go on but you get the idea. So why did I watch it twice? Well, one of my guilty pleasures is bad movies and I am a devoted fan of Carroll Baker and this movie fit both bills. Strangely enough the second time around I found much to like. The underwater scenes were really well done, especially those of the corals which were absolutely spectacular. The sharks were awesome, shown in all their predatory splendor and captivating ferocity. The cyclone scenes were also really cool, especially the ones of the seawall breaking and subsequent flooding. My guess is they were filming a real cyclone as these were not studio or miniature shots. And of course it starred Carroll Baker, still a knockout at 47, even without a hint of makeup. And Arthur Kennedy, at 64, in another trademark performance. Seeing him in this megalomaniac turkey was akin to a pilgrimage. To be honest, had it not been for these two actors I would not have bothered to see the film let alone review it.

Certainly an intense and at times campy little cult gem from Rene Cardon Jr. I'm a fan of the disaster film. Coming into this ,I wasn't quite prepared for some of what I saw. It has an interesting cast of European cult films, including Olga Karlatos from ZOMBIE. Just think of your standard disaster film with some shocking exploitation scenes. A friend told me after viewing that the filmmakers used real corpses to feed the sharks! Don't know if those folks donated there bodies to science, but even so its an entertaining obscurity. Warning to anyone with a weak stomach as this is quite out there in some scenes,in the gross-out department. As well as anybody who might own a poodle, you might like to turn away in 1 scene. All that said, CYCLONE, is much better than Cardonas other more known disaster film, SURVIVE.

Cyclone is a survival film directed by Late René Cardona Jr.. The film stars Late Arthur Kennedy, Carroll Baker, Late Lionel Stander, Andrés García, Late Mario Almada, Olga Karlatos and Late Edith González.

After a surprise cyclone hits the area, tourists become stranded on a boat in the sea, and they have to do anything in order to survive. To make matters even worse, they're joined by the survivors of a plane crash and a sinking boat.

These types of film neither excites nor disappoints. The film sounded like a b grade soft porn flick but on the contrary the film has a very limited to minimalistic of nudity. While the film has some decent scenes shot of the sea but the slow screenplay and the length of the film makes it look clumsy.

The best part of the film (worse for the viewers who were expecting some violence or gore) is that the film is very little explicit considering that the film has some shark attacks and cannibalism and also it didn't look effective also you can't connect yourself with the plight of the survivors.

Acting in the film is average and the dialogues of the film makes the film a laughing stock. The screenplay is dull and makes the film boring. The climax of the film is also unnecessarily stretched and makes it weary.

Overall an below par film which could've been good.

Now this one had some damn good ideas. A cyclone reeks havoc, and we follow the struggle for survival of not one, but three groups of people (initially on a plane, a tourist boat and a fishing boat), all afloat in the vast ocean waters. But somehow director René Cardona Jr manages to mess up everything he possibly can and turns it into a pretty damn bad movie. The acting is downright hilarious. And some people speaking with their mouths closed due to bad dubbing, does not help things either. But it does make it funnier. The dialogues are close to being the most stupid, idiotic and plain ridiculous things I've ever heard in a movie. Yes, there's a bit of cannibalism. Yes there's a couple of shark attacks. But nothing too explicit. And that's okay, really. Doesn't have to be. When the rest of the movie's good, at least. But it's not. It's bland and uninspired with just plain retarded characters. Too many of them, even. And learning that there's even a version of this film running no less than 118 minutes, I wonder now how redundant a movie can actually get.

René Cardona Jr made the overlong, boring and trashy shark flick Tintorerra a year before he went to make this overlong, boring and trashy disaster/survival flick with sharks thrown in. I can only imagine that the director was a real big fan of Steven Spielberg's Jaws as this is his second shark flick where sharks are not the main focus, and by rights don't actual have a real part to play in the story. I am thankful to say that he has ditched the soap opera elements of Tintorerra in favour of some more exploitative survival style elements, and it's slightly more interesting; although really the film is a mess and far to boring to entertain. The plot focuses on an airplane full of people that crashes during a storm. The survivors get themselves onto a small boat and are swept out to sea, but it's not long before hunger starts setting in, and this in turn sets off arguments between the survivors as they realise that they have to eat...something. However, their hunger isn't the only thing they are under threat from, as there's sharks in the vicinity too.

The plot actually sounded like it might lead to something decent, and I dare say it would have done in the hands of a decent director. However, René Cardona Jr is obviously not one of those and he manages to turn the whole thing on its head and ensures that nothing about the film is likable. The idea of people being forced into cannibalism is interesting; but the characters are boring and the overall atmosphere is far too impressive for the film to be enjoyable at the same time. There are some real unpleasant scenes in the film, and while this might have pleased some people; they are not done very well at all and a scene that sees a man kill a dog, for example, looks incredibly fake and stupid. The location used is just about the only successful element; as we see the people baking in the hot sun and this helps to get their desperate situation across. Anyone going into this film is liable to be extremely disappointed as there are no sharks at all for most of the film (excluding some stock footage) and they don't appear until the last ten minutes. By then, it would have taken something really special to create some excitement, but predictably; we are only served more disappointment.