Metal Tornado (2011)

People are voting emotionally.

Best movie ever!

The first must-see film of the year.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

This made for TV movie boasts the same fine quality production we have come to love in these masterpieces. Lou Diamond Phillips stars as a young looking Michael Edwards who works at Helios World. The company has a plan to extract energy from upper level ionic particles due to solar flares. (Light takes 8 minutes to travel from the sun to the earth. These flares take far less time.) Once captured, the energy is beamed to the earth as blue electromagnetic waves.Unfortunately things don't go as planned. It creates an electromagnetic tornado that attracts anything metal, regardless of its magnetic properties...and chainsaws keep operating! While LDP is attempting to save the countryside of rural Pennsylvania he has to deal with the problems of single parenthood and trying to date fellow co-worker (Nicole de Boer).The movie intensifies as LDP must hurry to come up with a way to save Philadelphia and France! Why do I not feel the intensity?Fairly awful sci-fi movie, about Asylum grade. Might work for tweens.No f-bombs, sex, or nudity.

Lately I notice a trend in IMDb.Folks either rate a movie 7 and above,or 1.There is nothing in between.The phrase 'the worst movie I have ever seen" comes up more and more often.Although I admit this movie is not good it's not the worst movie I have ever seen.If you want to see a movie that has the production values and quality of Shawshank Redemption for example this is not the movie for you.So it happened that I was in mood and at a time that I wanted to see something "lighter", and this movie was it.It's a low budget flick that it doesn't pretend for a moment to be a blockbuster.It has decent acting,good continuity,and a sub par script.And what is it with the sci-fi criticism anyway?.All of a sudden people are bothered terribly by the "downloading of energy"but not bothered that the crue of Enterprise usually travels at 7-9 times the speed of light.You know there is a reason why these movies are called science FICTION.Having also seen the atrocious Super Cyclone I am not ready to jump the bandwagon and call this movie the worst i have ever seen.

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...

First of all, it's a stinker. Secondly, it's a Canadian stinker. Fans of science-fiction pretty well agree that nobody has ever made a good sci- fi movie and there is nothing in this movie to challenge that axiom. But this has the added handicap of being a bad Canadian sci-fi movie. The story line is silly and predictable. The acting is wooden and clichéd. But even being awful could be forgiven if they had not used the Ottawa Valley to masquerade as Pennsylvania. Have these people no shame? They drape American flags over obviously eastern Ontario architecture and then run credits at the end about all the government support. This must be as big a source of puzzlement to foreign audiences as it is of embarrassment to Canadian ones.I suppose the problem is that our brilliant movie people (directors and actors both) go to Hollywood, leaving only the hacks and greenhorns to slurp at the public trough while grinding out artless and unoriginal bumpfh like this and posing as artists. This movie made me bored. It made me embarrassed. And it made me mad!