METAL TORNADO is your usual CGI disaster movie put out by the SyFy Channel. This one was made in Canada and features not one, not two, but three actors well-known for appearing in B-movies; namely Lou Diamond Phillips, Nicole de Boer, and Greg Evigan. Phillips gets the biggest part here and seems to even be making an effort in places, putting his heart into what is an otherwise deeply clichéd character.This film is slightly better than average for the genre, although I put the emphasis on 'slightly'. That's because the emphasis is on effects and action, much like the cheesy-but-fun SHARKNADO movies. There are few of those boring guys-in-suits interludes here, just widespread destruction as a magnetic tornado travels around the countryside, liberally hoovering up anything made of metal.Oftentimes, METAL TORNADO offers up so-bad-it's-good entertainment. Certainly the CGI effects are so pitiful as to be laughable, particularly when chainsaws and cars are picked up into the air. The tornado itself looks like a crude drawing when it's on the screen, and the scenes in which the actors interact with it are hilarious. The plot is bog standard and the writing weak throughout, but if you want an unintentional laugh or ten then this is the film to check out.

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.

You can't expect much from a seriously low budget movie with a seriously naff concept. I bought this on DVD in an end-of-line shop on 50% discount, so I think I got a good deal for my €0,75.Okay. The plot. Barely a plot, there's a bunch of badly rendered satellites that take energy from a solar flare and convert it to a sort of blue magnetic pulse that is blasted down to a ground station where it is picked up by an array of things that look like a cross between a television aerial and the framework thing that holds my tent up. If you're busy gagging right now, please disable the scientific part of your mind for this movie runs on "looks good on screen" rather than any sort of coherent logic. During the first run, something goes wrong, lights flash, nerdy people look worried. Some sort of twirling blue magnetic field wanders off from the array, then everything calms down. Yes, I said a blue magnetic field, for this is obviously a parallel universe where magnetic fields are visible. That'd be kinda cool, imagine science class. Anyway, this magnetic field turns out to be a tornado (yes, really!) sucking up metal things as it goes. I don't really see I needed to mention this review was spoilers because, you know, clue in the title. But with IMDb's scary-looking blacklist message, I'm not taking risks. There's the scientist, the greedy company big-cheese who wants to cover it all up, the hapless civilians, the "will we save the town/the capital/the world/etc" question. I think you pretty much know how this will go, these sorts of movies rarely and with "...and humanity was extinct" because that would be a downer.So, since this review contains spoilers, I will point out some of my favourite parts. Firstly the girl was pretty cute which is always a good thing, but the rebellious boy? Didn't buy it. Special kudos to the girl for not only being able to help lift a massive lump of concrete, but to do so wearing high heels. Then there's the hard-ass biker chick who is about as hard-ass as the boy (in other words, not). I almost choked on my tea when they had a shot of the tornado with all its metal crap flying around and there was the chainsaw, still running. What? Actually it was pretty funny. Like the tornado sucking up metal objects like cars and mobile homes, but curiously leaving wooden structures intact because we know well that wooden houses don't contain nails or wiring or water pipes. I guess the budget didn't extend to that sort of thing. Then one destroys huge swathes of Paris, but nobody seems overly concerned because, hey, we saved Phili. Not to mention that there's no significant ore deposit leading to Paris. According to the so-called science, the tornado should have ravaged the Lorraine region with its significant ore deposits.However, having said all of this, I can say that the "Metal Tornado", on the whole, was an enjoyable hour and a half. I'm just not sure they intended for it to be a comedy!

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!