Tornado Valley

WOW!.. from the get go u will think.... "what the.." then... "get off n run stupid!..." then.. "just grab her little butt n run!!..." THEN......"why the hell am I still watching this?!.." The way the storm came over the trees WITHOUT displacing them in any kind of way is laughable! Maybe this is a comedy... Who knows.

I do know this movie is lame from the beginning. I'd be embarrassed to be associated with this movie. I assume this is a 'foot in the door' for some new young actors to get their face out there or for some desperate actor taking on whatever role they can to grab some money to make ends meet.. Cause DAMN!!! really???!!

XP

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.

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.

Slow plot with melodramatic off-on-again-maybe estranged couple get buzz of mutual affection after weathering a tornado. The storms were not convincing, and the story was shallow and took forever to move along. I was pleased with the actors and their performances but they didn't have a story to work. I felt like turning this off several times but was watching with a friend who says it was "better than what we were watching before" which was a bad documentary. I think it was supposed to be a twister suspense story but was instead a long winded tale about a vaguely relevant family's story of recovery of trauma from a tornado 25 years earlier. Good color. Poor story. I would not recommend it. You wait until the last minute to find out what disaster might bring, but I felt let down.

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...