Alien Tornado

You thought sharks into tornadoes was crazy, wait until you see this. Under the name of Tornado Warning (not to be confused with the 2002 film) on the original DVD packaging and in a re-release under the name of Alien Storm (why it was re-released in the first place beats me) this film delivers cheesy fun that has a good mix of drama, comedy, and suspense about aliens taking the form of tornadoes and the attempts by the government and main characters to stop them. The tornadoes destroying Chicago reminded me of Category 6: Day of Destruction, whether it was coincidence or not I found it to be nice. I had some difficulty finding a region 1 DVD, when I bought it and watched the film again to refresh my memory since it's been over a year since I've seen it I felt like I got my moneys worth.

On a windy day in the country, pretty in her pony-tail Stacey Asaro (as Kelly Walker) gets off the school bus and checks her mailbox. Thrilled at receiving great SAT scores, Ms. Asaro shares the news with scruffy-looking, bearded daddy Jeff Fahey (as Judd Walker). He doesn't seem as excited. Although she claims to be 17-years-old, daughter Asaro probably lies to cover being in high school for several extra years. She should be both unashamed and happy, and Mr. Fahey should be jumping for joy. Their celebration is interrupted when the wind builds to a dangerous tornado. Meanwhile, in Chicago, storm-chaser and climate expert Kari Wuhrer (as Gail Curtis) detects a tornado on her laptop. These tornadoes are not normal. They glisten with green light, shoot out lightning bolts and move around like they're a form of intelligent life... Syfy should probably stop trying to make serious science-fiction and just concentrate on comedies. That doesn't mean sci-fi movies can't be made on a low budget. The Syfy channel simply doesn't know how to do them. In fact, good science-fiction films can be made on even lower budgets. The aforementioned players take their assignment much too seriously, although the two leading women wear tight tank tops. The name appearing most often in the credits is Ken Badish, with Jeff Burr directing. They succeed mostly with cartoon-like villain David Jensen (as Armstrong) and likewise toned Sheriff Willard E. Pugh (as Norman "Norm" Mackey). The one who really captures the true worth of her surroundings is corpulent Claire Conti (as Denise Gordon). Her performance as the bubbly, obese climate assistant is a tornado of fun. ** Alien Tornado(2012-04-21) Jeff Burr ~ Jeff Fahey, Kari Wuhrer, Stacey Asaro, Willard E. Pugh

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?

At least this movie was watchable and maybe even re-watchable, which is more than I can say for many Hollywood "A" pictures. The core idea of Alien Tornado was good and even somewhat original: Aliens invade Earth with something other than spaceships and death-rays. Given that setup and SyFy's regular treatment, it's a mildly entertaining entry with some fun bits here and there. Again, more than can be said for certain top-rated movies. Jeff Fahey from Lost and Kari Wuhrer from Sliders were good enough for the material and I enjoyed their performances, though the director might have rushed through some scenes. No, the effects weren't great but, in my opinion, they were effective which is all I expect effects to be. As for the screenplay, characters and dialogue I've got news for you: most big-budget blockbusters start out like this. The producers then bring in the high-powered script doctors to fix everything up, change or remove characters, make the "science" sound more believable, tweak dialogue into something resembling human speech. SyFy budgets don't allow for this so what we end up seeing feels like a first draft -- which is what it is, probably.

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.

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.

I saw the previews for this movie on the Syfy channel a few days ago and thought it was going to be a really good movie to watch considering that they viewed all of the action parts. Turns out that this movie was a complete letdown. First of all, let us focus on the good parts of the movie: The design for the alien tornadoes was pretty interesting, emitting a bright green glow. They also have the power to shoot lightning bolts from the spinning vortex and grab running pedestrians with funnel-like tentacles and carry them beyond the clouds. The destruction of the city is pretty cool, especially when the scoreboard from the Chicago baseball stadium flies right into your face before a commercial break. Well, that's pretty much it for the good parts, now onto the bad ones, and trust me there are a lot. I structured them into a few categories. Characters: Most of the characters that we encounter are hardly even learned about. All we know is Judd who possibly lost his wife in a twister four years ago, Kelly is a farm girl who brushes horses and is the first girl in the family to get an opportunity to go to college(she wants to be a scientist and is basically the heroine of the movie), Gail is a scientist who frequently reports daily news on her website and is a storm chaser, Norm who is a county sheriff that is trying to do his job, some woman who rides a moped and is Gail's number one fan, and that's it. Everybody else is just so faint and unrecognizable. These actors ceased to make me feel like some people are important, however I felt that the actor who played the cop and the actress who played Shelly were more credible. Plot: The plot is just ridiculous. After an hour into the movie I had no idea what the hell was happening. There are so many questions that are unanswered. What exactly happened to their mother (yes, it was probably a twister "back in 2008"?) Who are these bosses that Armstrong keeps referring to? Why are the aliens attacking in the first place, and how do they exist in Earth's clouds? After the aliens were sent back, what happened to those who were sent up in the clouds, are they supposed to be raining down? WHERE DID THEY GO? Special effects: As before, this was probably the only thing that made this movie watchable but at the same time it barely shows anything being destroyed, especially during the farm scene in the beginning when it is first revealed. Concept: By using the power of technology to transmit signals in order to communicate with aliens "in the clouds," humanity has the ability to cease utter and apocalyptic destruction from several F5 tornadoes, with winds up to 350 miles per hour, instead of the most humane thing which is hiding inside a house's basement to prevent serious injury (Armstrong even says this in the movie). Lessons: The lessons in this movie are horrible: -leaving your child abandoned near a bridge -promising to save money for your daughter's college fund and instead use it to cover property insurance for a twister that previously hit four years ago, then telling it to her when it's already too late -trusting nobody that can possibly stop the chaos -getting into a car with a stranger (it was even SAID IN THE MOVIE) References: I can't believe the worker for the Channel 37 news station (I think he was Terry) compared the destruction and collapse of buildings to the real-life terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001. Are you serious?! Whoever wrote the script for this movie took it a little too far. Conclusion: This movie is horribly confusing and boring. The only remarkable thing that was interesting, like I said before, were the effects but that was just a minor improvement. This movie is as terrible and boring as Triassic Attack, but 2012: Ice Age and Polar Storm on the other hand were slightly better in my opinion. This is the kind of movie one would watch if you want to punish and bore yourself to death. Stick to other movies instead.

I can't believe this got funded to produce. Bad acting, predictable dialog, poor script, and terrible cgi. I'm used to pure dribble from the SciFi network but this is so bad I couldn't watch it at all. It tries to be the X-files but is as trite, cliché ridden as I have ever seen. Avoid this as at all costs, pure waste of time. Everyone involved with this project should be deeply embarrassed. I plead the 5th--the 5th of bourbon it would it take me to get numb enough to sit through this crap. It has no redeeming values whatsoever. Who would even want to promote this? A Smurfs marathon could only rot your brain worse. I never write reviews but I couldn't be silent on this one.

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...

Alien Tornado (2012) ** (out of 4) Another epic from SyFy has a farmer (Jeff Fahey), his smart daughter (Stacey Asaro), a tornado blogger (Kari Wuhrer) and a small town cop (Willard E. Pugh) noticing that the latest tornadoes aren't being reported by the media and there's just something completely different about them. It turns out that aliens are actually controlling them to take out Earth for a numbers of reasons but the biggest is that they're tired of our Bandwith bothering them. Again, it always shocks me that so many people watch these SyFy films and then complain about their low-budgets, silly plots and all around "C" material. I mean seriously, you're coming to a movie called ALIEN TORNADO so why are you expecting something great or some sort of lost classic? This film is mainly going to appeal to those who enjoy low-budget movies that are cheesy and instead of delivering first-rate material they just offer up mild entertainment. There were a lot of entertaining things in this movie as well as a few interesting cast and crew members. For starters, Jeff Burr is best remembered for LEATHERFACE: THE Texas CHAINSAW MASSACRE III and it was good seeing him back making a movie. He handles the material a lot better than most of these SyFy movies and I thought he at least kept the thing moving without it getting too slow. It was also great seeing Fahey. People complain about these movies but at least they give some good character actors a chance to be a lead. I thought Fahey was very good in his part and he did a very believable bit. He just wasn't picking up a paycheck and that's a lot more than most can say. I also thought Asaro, Wuhrer and Pugh were good in their parts and the four worked extremely well together. While the screenplay doesn't build up their characters much, the actors at least give strong enough performances to where you can care for them. The special effects of the tornadoes are quite cheap but I did like the design with the neon green lights. The story itself was quite silly and never really made too much sense. This was especially true during the final when we're given the explanation of what's going on. Again, if you're looking for a sci-fi masterpiece then it would be best to check out 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. If you're looking for cheap entertainment then that's why movies like ALIEN TORNADO are made.