Metal Tornado (2011) Reviews

• Alrighty then...

  paul_haakonsen2011-10-23

  Well, just given the title of this movie you already know what you are in for. And true enough, this movie delivered exactly what was expected. The storyline alone was so implausible, and it was really hard to buy into what was happening. Throughout the movie I was curling my toes every time I saw that electromagnetic tornado. It was just such a bad concept. As for the cast in "Metal Tornado", well the only face I recognized was Lou Diamond Phillips. Now I am not one to judge his selection in roles in movies, but "Metal Tornado", for real? The people in the movie were doing good jobs with their roles, it was just the story that was halting and dragging everything down. There are lots of disaster movies out there, and there seem to be no real middle ground. The disaster movies are either super awesome with amazing effects, or they are quite the opposite; disasters in themselves. "Metal Tornado" must be said to be in the latter of the two categories. There are far better disaster movies available out there, and "Metal Tornado" is good for only less than mediocre entertainment if you are really, really into disaster movies and have nothing better to do. Honestly, then I have seen worse disaster movies than "Metal Tornado", but still, it was hardly worth sitting through from start till end.

• Lou Diamond Phillips' career versus a Magnetic Tornado

  DanLives19802012-07-30

  Just about the best thing I can say about this film is that it doesn't ruin LDP's career. The 90's did that already. Whereas I am not a fan of his work outside of Young Guns and Renegades, I appreciate that he can be a good entertainer with very little effort. But whoever his agent is needs to lay off the freebasing or just die from it! Metal Tornado is what the industry call a B-Movie. It's not. It's a Y-Movie. As in Y-The-Hell-Do-They-Fund-These-Films when there are people starving in the 3rd World and limbless, homeless refugees from the wars the West start. As in, 'Event Horizon' was a B-Movie, this was made for TV and made no attempt whatsoever to try to meet standards of filmmaking in any sense. The story is that Diamond is a scientific type guy with no background but for being a bit rebellious to the point where nobody ever listens to him. When he goes out to investigate a series of magnetic storms that are ripping everything metallic out of the local farming community - from gardening appliances and toasters right down to the corrugated iron off the barn walls and roofs - the shady scientific type company that is responsible for the disaster refuses to believe him when he says, 'it's our fault!' So he goes about proving it anyway while trying to save people from a really crap rip-off version of Twister. You see, a top secret scientific type thing of theirs has escaped and turned into a magnetic storm and yes I'm repeating myself just like the film does and then LDP has to go rescue people while really awful CGI - as in not just awful looking but awfully thought out - tries to steal the show and also while the shady guy who runs his shady scientific type company tries to deny everything. I mean for gods sake, there's a POV scene from within the tornado at one point where an active chainsaw is buzzing around in circles. Do chainsaws operate by themselves in America? Expect me to find such rubbish enjoyable but don't insult my intelligence. And damn you, SyFy channel, for putting this on me. Spell your name right as well, it's just not clever. Another thing besides the visuals, non existent context and awfully bland dialogue that doesn't give me a single cause for thought or emotion, the crap "action" and the one dimensional characters is the sound effects and music. How do they make the music to films like this? Because I have a keyboard from ten years ago that makes better quality music. That means that when this film was made, my £80 keyboard was more up to date than the composer's equipment. And I bought mine from Argos for cryin' out loud. I could beat-box a better soundtrack to this film. I could steal music off the internet, re-edit it and pass it off as original and it'd do better than the single track synth string soundtrack they employed for this. That and the sound effects are shop-bought at such a cheap price that they could have just employed Michael Winslow to wobble his lips over a microphone and gotten a better result! I feel better now...

• Nothing could have prepared me for the awfulness of this movie...

  TheLittleSongbird2011-11-15

  Despite it airing on the notorious SyFy channel, I saw it anyway hoping for a film to ease my mind after a very on-edge weekend. I have seen some awful movies, whether on SyFy or not, and while SyFy have done much worse, Metal Tornado was awful. I will give some credit, the acting is not too bad, there has been far worse acting than this. The problem was that the actors didn't have anything to work from, as the characters are so dull I didn't give a tuppence about them and the dialogue has no natural flow to it at all. The effects, photography and editing are haphazard and the music has melodrama written all over it, but it's the story that sinks Metal Tornado, not only does it drag to the point of boredom and doesn't make any sense whatsoever, I failed to see the point to it. The concept didn't grab me, and at the end of the day I just didn't care. All in all, I was kind of expecting it to be bad, but not this awful. At least the actors tried, however that is the only good thing I can say about the movie. 2/10 Bethany Cox

• when you want to make a movie about a metal tornado...

  randy_kay2013-09-05

  Then you have to throw all logic right out the window and that's exactly what they did with this movie. I get annoyed when people make films that are based around science but then get the science wrong. In this film, there are some blatant mistakes like the dome part of a silo on a farm that gets ripped off by the 'magnetic tornado' yet that would not happen in 'reality' because the domes on silos are made of aluminum which is not magnetic. Also, you can't 'download' energy from anywhere and quickly 'store' it, at least not currently and this movie is filmed in the here and now so the entire basis is impossible. Now for the 'evil entrepreneur' who runs this fictitious power company in the film called 'Helios'. I guess since the film company that made this is based in Ottawa, this shows what part-time government employees who have little film production companies think 'entrepreneurs' are all about, evil men that will do anything, even kill employees who find design flaws in their systems. Most of the acting was quite good, Lou Diamond Phillips and Kate Drummond were stand outs. I can't understand why they chose Nicole de Boer for the main role when they could have used Kate Drummond -- it makes no sense but then neither does a tornado made out of metal... or sharks etc. The small part by Camille Solari was humorous. They should have just pulled out all the cheese and gone all in and made the chainsaw that gets magnetized at the start of the film and seems to develop a mind of it's own, go a frigging killing rampage. Why not -- the whole thing was so unbelievable that they could have just done anything with it at that point. Most of these films would make far better comedies than sci-fies if they would just take them in that direction.

• A Three Word Review

  bdenyes2011-08-01

  "Just plain awful" - everything about this movie is bad, bad, bad. Why bother making or watching this film? Another terrible movie from Canada - and I'm Canadian!! I watched this because it was filmed in and around the City of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada where I live. They used the empty Nortel office complex site for their filming and a few other locations around Ottawa. Of course, they had to make it look like an American setting - a small town outside Philadelphia. The acting is horrible, the script just abysmal and the whole premise pure nonsense. There were a few not too bad special effects - but even they were rare. The whole salvation of the world is placed in the hands of a hick southern Sheriff and Lou Diamond Phillips. And in the end, the Americans prevail saving Philadelphia but Paris is destroyed - ugh!! The characters actually smugly hug, smile and congratulate themselves on saving the USA in the film's closing scene - gut wrenching to say the least. The makers of this film couldn't have picked a more appropriate tag line to promote their film - "Nothing Can Prepare You For This" - how very, very true!!