Nature Unleashed: Tornado

I don't believe the term "spoilers" applies to this film. Whatever you could hear about the film before seeing it would not "spoil" your experience, because you'll have a bad one no matter what.

This film is so bad you can't even laugh about it. It doesn't have the charm of bad gore movies, it doesn't have any charm, actually.

The acting is more than bad, whoever decided to cast Daniel Bernhardt as Josh Pallady should be hit repeatedly with something cold and wet. He couldn't act his way out of a wet paper bag.

The script must have been written in less than 24 hours by some kid who's read too many occult books. All the symbols are connected in this movie in such a stupid way.

You would expect something about tornadoes, but they only play a small part, it's mostly occult gibberish intertwined with stereotypes (boy travels with girl, girl can't stand him, boy goes to have dinner with other girl, the first girl gets jealous kind of thing) the number 666, devil worshipers, talismans, gypsies telling fortunes, insane asylum...

Seriously everything that's been overdone in the history of cinema and literature is being shown in this movie.

It's so bad, i can't even start to describe it. It still amazes me how producers read the synopsis and said, "Yes, we'll buy it." Why???! I really recommend NEVER seeing that piece of cinematic garbage. If you have to decide between watching this on TV or spending an evening looking at the paint peeling from your walls, I seriously recommend the latter.

If you hear of this movie, and all the others in this series (Volcano, Earthquake, Fire), RUN AWAY!!!

After watching the death of his father by a deadly tornado, Josh Pallady (Daniel Bernhardt) is left with just a necklace or medallion of some kind to remember him by. Due to chance, Josh is sent to Romania to film a press conference & some kind of gypsy rituals. This is where he meets Irena (Anya Lahiri), a gypsy woman who reads tarot cards. Irena quickly identifies the necklace as the Talisman.

The Talisman, as the story goes, was given by the angel Gabriel to a king and would be handed down to the "chosen one", who would save the gypsies from the wind. This is pretty much when the movie went south.

The acting by everyone involved is pretty bad, terrible even, but at least Anya Lahiri was something nice to look at. Her acting was not as bad as the other main characters, either. This is not saying much, but she was probably the best actor/actress in the movie.

Plotwise, the movie would have been better with just the tornadoes & the tornado chasing scenes. The whole thing could have done without the satanic cult subplot. I do not really see where that fits into a movie titled "Tornado". Anyhow, if it was not for some decent looking tornado effects, which is why I wanted to watch this, I would have rated it lower. As it stands I leave it a 3/10.

The movie opens with a stupid guy chaining himself to a not-so-sturdy backyard appliance so he can make a home-movie doco of a CGI tornado roaring by without getting blown away himself. The winds are clearly blowing his hair *sideways*, yet he's magically getting pulled straight *upwards* (clue numero uno that this movie is gonna suck bigtime ... as if it being a "SciFi original" Saturday Nite feature wasn't a big enough tip-off). Suddenly, a shot rang out. The wife screamed. The family dog peed on the rug. And Mr. Tornado Paparazzo gets his chain yanked and gets sucked into the whirling vortex of suckiness that is this movie.

Next, we cut to a scene in which his now grown-up son is himself a professional photog, covering some completely-out-of-left-field story about Gypsies (whoops, sorry, the PC term is "The Roma") being victims of discrimination in ... New Jersey. Thus completely sending the What-the-F***-o-Meter off the scale. And unbelievable as it might seem, the movie (and I use the term very, very loosely) manages to go downhill from there.

Perhaps the only remotely interesting thing about this bizarre mishmash of the meteorological and Roma-nesque is that it stars Swiss hunk-o-cheese Daniel Bernhardt, who played Agent Johnson in The Matrix Reloaded (2003), but who is much better known to Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans for his brilliant portrayal of The Runaway karate-foo guy in Future War. ("Well, it's not really the Future and we didn't have the budget to do a War, but we did rent a whole bunch of these empty cardboard boxes for Dan to get thrown through during the fight scenes...") Wow - if I could give this one negative stars (Note to IMDb - we need black holes!) I would. About the only not-explicitly-bad thing I can say about this one is: it's a worthy sequel to "Fire: Nature Unleashed (2004)." (Well, it's not really worthy, and it's not really a sequel, but the titles *are* similar.)

I am dumbfounded. We have churches and synagogues and books about this superior being that rules us, we have billions of people who worship this figure and devote their every fiber to him...but why? If God was real, why would he allow a movie as abysmal as "Tornado" to be created? "Tornado" is, shortly put, the worst thing I have ever seen.

Just from the prologue, I should've been able to tell that my eight bucks had been wasted down the drain. In a humorous flashback, a father photographs a tornado that has touched down on his ranch, and he straps himself to a tractor for security. However, the tornado is getting closer and closer, and time is running out! So what does this man do? What any sensible father would: he unstraps himself and commits suicide by getting sucked away into the whirly vortex behind him for no reason. This should have been forshadowing to the horror that awaited me, but I pressed on.

What is "Tornado" about? Well our characters drive somewhere, talk to some throw-away character for about five minutes, drive somewhere else, talk to some other guy, drive somewhere else, talk to another guy,rather rinse repeat 50x. In this films 98 minute long runtime, I'd say about 80 minutes are spent on talking in the car and talking to some overly dramatic expositionist. And the dialog is some of the worst and clichéd I've ever heard, with brilliant and witty lines like "God, if you're there, please help us all" or "I haven't touched myself in 20 years" "Nobody can stop me now! I am the ruler of a new world! *diabolical laughter*" Although, you could say the reason why there is so much dialog is because the film team was so embarrassed by the CGI; that would actually be a legit reason for filming so many pointless dialog scenes.

Speaking of CGI...oh, my, word. I cannot describe how asinine the effects in this movie are. I know this film is low budget and all...but, c'mon, this film was directed by a special effects artist, he couldn't give his team some input? The tornadoes look like the result of little kids drawing on the film tape with their crayons.

Actually, I think this film might be worth it for the ending. The 1st and 2nd act of this movie might the biggest waste of film tape in history, but the final act is where the crap hits the ceiling. Ever want to see a tornado with a face and arms? Ever want to see multiple tornadoes with faces and arms, picking up people and eating them as they twist along? Well, here is your movie. Seriously though, this is one of the funniest climaxes I've ever seen.

In all seriousness, the funniest part might not be in the movie itself, but in the "behind the scenes" extra. In it, the director goes off about how his film is "modern day art" and a "flawless masterpiece in every field." To this day, some say my jaw is still there, sitting on the floor. I understand wanting to show pride in your work, this guy goes on and on and on about how flawless this movie is, when he is absolutely oblivious to the steaming pile of feces he has produced. Even if Werner Herzog were to speak this way about Fitzcarraldo it'd be annoying, but Alain Jakubowicz's regard makes him look like a fool.

If I pass away and head on to the pearly gates, God will ask me "You were an atheist? Dear man, why did thou not believe in me?" and I will just pull this DVD out of my pocket. Then again, I would be carrying this DVD around in my pocket, so I guess I lose on every account.

Well, I stumbled upon the 2005 movie titled "Nature Unleashed: Tornado" here in 2021. Sure, I hadn't even heard about it. But after all, I do like natural disaster movies, and this 2005 movie definitely seemed like such a movie. So of course I sat down to watch it.

And it turns out that writer J. Paul V. Robert set out to implement a movie with equal amounts of natural disaster, politics and superstitious mumbo jumbo. And that was just too much of a scrambled heap of rubbish. It utterly made the movie into something abysmal and rather stupid to watch.

I must admit that I found "Nature Unleashed: Tornado" from director Alain Jakubowicz to be not quite what I had expected and believed it to be. Nor can I say that I found much of any enjoyment in the movie as the storyline unfurled and the storyline just fell further and further apart into stupidity.

Visually then "Nature Unleashed: Tornado" was somewhat of a mixed bag, because some scenes were rather nicely filmed and set up, while other scenes were just eyesores to witness given the atrocious CGI effects.

Sure, "Nature Unleashed: Tornado" was a disaster movie. But not a natural disaster movie, mind you. This was just not a great movie.

My rating of the 2005 movie "Nature Unleashed: Tornado" lands on a mere two out of ten stars.