Devil Winds (2003)

Too much of everything

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Powerful

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is not bad for a TV movie, the special effects and acting overall are pretty good compared to other tornado TV movies, this film is up there with Night of the Twisters since it keeps you glued to the screen wandering about what's about to happen next.If there are two things that stood out in this film is the use of unused footage from Twister (which I've found very interesting) and the ridiculousness of putting a disease containment facility in Tornado Alley. I also have to ask the question of why the producers used similar looking tornadoes in each sequence, did they run out of budget or was there a tight deadline? I found the similar tornadoes to be distracting.In retrospect, this film is good and does have some re-watch value.

DEVIL WINDS is the latest in a string of TV disaster movies I've seen. This one's quite obviously a spin on TWISTER, except of course it's nowhere near as good as that (average in itself) production. It's a film packed with grotty soap opera and boring dialogue and not nearly enough disaster.I knew this was going to be poor when I saw the attempted acting of the mother in the opening scene, which is laughable to say the least. It gets worse from there. The male lead is invariably wooden, the female lead an ageing has-been who was once on BAYWATCH, and the family drama type stuff is intensely grating.Scenes involving actual tornadoes are limited to the beginning, middle and end. There's a funny scene of a twister chasing a jeep, and later on a bit where a twister destroys a building. With nobody inside it, who cares? The CGI effects are pitiful, and looked like something out of THE SIMS at one point.No real reason to bother with this one, even genre aficionados will be sorely pressed to find something of merit.

Adherence to current meteorological theory and good storm-chasing practices was not a hallmark of Twister. The science was atrocious and real storm chasers doing the bonehead things that our heroes did would've ended up smeared across vast stretches of the Great Plains. However, it more than made up for its factual flaws by being one hell of a great roller-coaster ride.And in comparison to 'Devil Winds', Twister is Citizen Kane, and a National Weather Service documentary to boot.It isn't so much that the science is bad in Devil Winds.It's non-existent to the point of being insulting to one's intelligence.It isn't bad enough that an allegedly professional meteorologist attempts escaping a poorly-CGI'd tornado by trying to out-run it. For the record: if one is caught on the road, drive at a right angle to the tornado, so that as quickly as possible it's not heading toward you anymore—it's passing behind you and moving away.But no. Not only does Our Hero™ drive directly away from the digital funnel cloud—which is about forty or fifty feet behind him at most—it follows him around an s-curve in the road.Let me repeat that: it *follows* the *curve* in the *road*.Upon reaching his destination, the tornado takes a twenty minute coffee break. It has been some fifteen meters behind him the whole time, and when he stops the car and gets out to protect an endangered building, the titular Devil Wind is suddenly nowhere to be seen. Why? Maybe it stopped off for a Slurpee. It would make as much sense as anything else in this movie.There's more, but it all seems so very irrelevant. It's all formulaic and predictable. It should come as no surprise that the building where the tornado's coffee break occurs is an Incredibly Dangerous Disease Storage Center at which the obligatory Estranged Offspring® of Our Hero™ works—and of which, of course, the boss is a crook.About the only cliché left out was having it built on an ancient Indian burial ground. Sheesh.This was first run on Pax (now ION), so unsurprisingly the Estranged Offspring® and Our Hero™ have by the end of the movie a Tearful Reconciliation© wherein All Is Forgiven (pat. pend.). And It couldn't have been more perfectly telegraphed by Samuel F.B. Morse himself.In short, Devil Winds is poorly thought out, poorly written, and poorly executed, and a bigger waste of a disc than anything outside of an AOL free trial.Save this for a MST3K Home Game.

It is a made for TV movie, in the genre that has been overdone to some extent. It does have some interesting moments, like the ride in the Hurricane Hunter. It is not a bad movie and certainly better than some of the late night, or early morning fair.I have certainly seen much worse. The actors made the best of the script given and yes, some of the footage would be better using older stock footage, buts lets all remember that this is a lower budget made for TV movie and is certainly not a waste of time. It is not a movie I would buy a copy of, but certainly better than a lot of what is out there.It has some interesting twist, no pun intended where it certainly diverges from Twister and Night of the Twisters.