I first saw this movie when it first came out on TV (I think it might have been on FX, not sure) in summer of 1996 when I was in first grade. My grandma taped it for me and once in a while when I'm bored I pop it in and do frame by frame on the only two scenes I like in this movie. The first one is the sequence where the chasers are standing on the hill and watch the nicely done(for a 1996 TV movie) computer generated twister smash into the fictional community of Roseville, Texas. It actually was a pretty decent destruction sequence. (If you watch closely you'll see the water tower get knocked down and the water tank does a few laps around the vortex, it's quite amusing
).
The other thing was when the storm chasing couple's (they reminded me of a youthful Gene and Karen Rhoden) black customized Chevy pickup truck getting rolled down Highway 385. It's fun to do frame by frame on that and just watch it get demolished as it does four or five rolls down the highway.
The opening scene is alright, with a single mother and her two daughters surviving a tornado in the cellar under their modular. When they emerge the house appears to have been hit by an F3, the entire house shifted off it's foundation and a greater portion of it destroyed.
But mostly this film has gross inaccuracies, far worse than those in Twister. For instance, after the tornado has gone through Roseville, Bruce Campbell's character comments that it was an F5 storm. But from the scenes they showed in Roseville, at most the damage was a strong F2/low end F3, with vehicles overturned/rolled but not thrown (Ok, so there was an old VW Bug up a tree, but they're extremely light cars so a strong F2 wouldn't have any problem lofting one of those), trees stripped of most of their branches/leave but not their bark, and missing roofs and partial sidewall destruction. Definitely not an F5. That really irritated me. :evil:
But the cheesiest part was when the supposed multi-vortex mega tornado was hitting the farm during the scene which is a poor rip-off of the sequences in Twister where Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton are chasing the menacing black tornado on the hill that throws the motorboat and tricycle among other things at them and of the final pumphouse scene. During that entire scene which was supposed to be the climax of the film, what was supposedly a violent tornado did three things:
1)Blew down a line of rotting fence posts
2)Blew away a barbeque grille
3)Knocked down an old garage/outbuilding thing
After they survive this "monster" tornado, the scenes of the next day show damage only on a par of an F1. And not only that but the storm obsessive grandfather got "sucked up" and killed by the storm. An F1 might blow you over or roll you across the ground a couple of yards but it will not kill you unless you get crushed by a tree or get caught in a collapsing outbuilding/shed or mobile home. How stupid is that?
Well, at least it's fun to watch just to savor how completley clueless Hollywood TV executives and producers are about tornadoes. :twisted:
Rating: 1 out of 5 stars for cheesy plot, grossly inaccurate information, and tasteless love scene between Bruce Campbell and the hot actress that played the government chick. If it wasn't for the two aforementioned scenes, this movie would be a complete zero out of five.
When there is a good TV movie about tornadoes, pigs will fly under their own power (porcine thrown out of airplanes or hot air balloons DOES NOT COUNT!!) :lol:
:lol: :lol:
