Tornado Warning

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.

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?

We all know the drill on SyFy channel movies. You can't compare them to anything other than previous SyFy channel movies. With shoestring budgets and B & C grade actors (mostly C), they crank out their "original" movies with regularity and zero surprises.

Alien Tornado did not break this tradition. This one was just slightly on the low side of the scale. The script was ridiculous, the characters thoroughly unappealing (I'm used to that), and the CGI SFX were only average. Now that home PC's with the latest processors can do the third level CGI that SyFy utilizes, you'd think they'd use the savings to ramp up the writing or actor expenditures. They don't. This one didn't even have any former stars in a cameo role.

The only reason to watch these things is because you're stuck at home and nothing else is on. And, of course, because you can figure out the plot by the first commercial break, and after that you can leave the room for a few minutes at any time and not worry about missing anything vital to the story.

This one was so completely silly and contrived that even hard core fans of SyFy movies will be disappointed. Not to worry. They'll be punching out another one in a few weeks. Ice Twisters vs. Alien Tornado perhaps? Paul Birkett wrote both. You know he's thinking about it.

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 watched because, Hey I'm a big fan of Kari Wuhrer, no matter what she is playing in. Well, she actually hasn't But, really she had two different outfits on when she got in the car she had white top and blue jeans, get's out the car and has a pink top and black pants...come on who is in charge of wardrobe..CUT!! But, seriously all and all not great, but not exactly horrible.. The special effects were good, the storyline was original.. The acting was OK, it's SYFY what do you expect, those of us that like Sci-Fi watch it because we like the idea of it all, not because of the realism.. So sit back and if you watch the movie, just watch it for what it is.. Entertainment...