Alien Tornado

Jeff Fahey is the only reason to watch this movie. In fact, most of the movies Jeff Fahey leads or costars in are like that. Oh, wait a minute. I just thought of another reason to watch this movie.

Imagine your great Aunt Mildred sitting on her sofa in front of the TV with her friends Gladys and Harriet. They are sipping some tea which they spiked with a bit of whiskey and are giggling while nibbling on their sugar cookies. They are watching this movie and appropriately gasping when the tornadoes appear or when someone gets sucked up by a tornado (a comical vision which offers no real fright) or when the bad guy puts on his rough act with the good guy (serious overacting here by nearly everyone in the movie but for Jeff Fahey and the lady who played his daughter, Stacey Asaro). Great Aunt Mildred leans forward and shouts at the TV, "Aw, shut up ya big bully!" Friends Harriet and Gladys loudly agree between giggles and sips of tea.

If you want a B movie which has some good stuff with a few laughable things in it, this isn't it. There is no good stuff. But there's lots of laughable things in it. Watch it with Great Aunt Mildred. It will make her happy. Seriously. She deserves quality time with you.

I had no illusions that this was a Oscar worthy blockbuster, but this movie is not one of the worst that Syfy has produced. This is a decent production that has comical acting and situations, CGI from the 1800s and matching bad guy uniforms. This movie definitely makes you groan at cheesy dialogue, scream in annoyance at the screen and ironically laugh at somber and tragic situations. Watch this when you have absolutely NOTHING else to do. You could do worse.

Giving a bad review to a SyFy movie is not really a challenge. It's so blatantly obvious thing to do that one has to think twice if it is even worth the time to type the bashing these films more often than not deserve. I'm beginning to feel like this is SyFy's strategy: keep churning out junk under the guise of light entertainment, because there are enough people that kinda enjoy passing their time watching these films and then there are those, like myself, who end up watching these in hopes something has changed.

Nothing has changed here. The images and the characters both are flat, the CGI is sub-par, and the script would again benefit from proofreading. Not that I don't trust the writers' English skills, but maybe a few more brains in the works would help in creating more passable builds of suspense, more pronounced motivations for characters etc. You know, a bit more oomph than tornadoes that are of alien origin coupled with the stock characters one can expect in such circumstances.

I've seen worse acting, and I've spent my time more foolishly, but to say that seeing a certain film is NOT the stupidest thing one can do is not really a compliment, now is it?

I'll be honest and say I wasn't expecting much from Alien Tornado, and that after seeing it it was neither better or worse than I was expecting. The coolest and most exciting set piece is the destruction of the city, there is some evidence tension and the effects are a step above the crude ones I was expecting in this scene. Jeff Fahey is also decent, as is the concept which is pretty original and showed potential for a watchable movie. However the rest of the movie doesn't show much promise. The effects are not the crudest I've seen but they're hardly great either. The editing is choppy at best, and the movie is dully lit. The script is very hackneyed and doesn't give the actors much to work from, the story is silly, contrived and dull, the characters are unappealing and stereotypical(a lot of them are severely underdeveloped as well) and Fahey aside the rest of the acting suffers from the banality of the writing. Overall, a bad movie but not terrible. 3/10 Bethany Cox

The usual silliness from the SyFy Channel. Jeff Fahey - who remains a solid, dependable stalwart of an actor, as always - plays a farmer who has to contend with tornadoes on his land. Except, of course, this being a sci-fi movie after all, these weirdly glowing tornadoes are actually electrified extraterrestrials!

Yes, it's as silly and as cheesy as you'd imagine from the title and premise, a film packed full of terrible special effects and worse acting. Aside from the aforementioned Fahey, viewers are treated to Kari Wuhrer (who looks like she's a fan of plastic surgery) as a glamorous stormchaser and David Jensen (complete with whiny voice) as a leader of some nefarious government agents also out hunting the aliens.

The action, when it occurs, is invariably disappointing, because the producers just don't have the budget to do justice to the premise. So viewers are left laughing along at the premise and enjoying the mildly diverting adventures. Yes, this is terrible, but also terribly inoffensive with it - just your average B-movie fun.