Metal Tornado (2011)

Cheap and generic isn't just my life in three words, it's also a part of exploitation movies since the dawn of movie history. It's nothing wrong with being generic, it's part of the game - and the best game for generic scripts is the disaster genre. I think we all can agree that not one single disaster movie is an original movie - and don't defend the 70's masterpieces in the genre, they stole everything from melodrama-king Douglas Sirk and older disaster movies like San Francisco, Deluge and When Worlds Collide. It's also my favourite genre and I never grow tired of seeing either miniatures or CG models getting torn aparts by natural disasters. It's all the same to me.

SyFy Channel has been a saviour of disaster porn for a number of years, spurting out cheap flicks over and over again. After other storm-themed movies like Ba'al: The Storm God and Ice Twister, NYC: Tornado Terror and Space Twister comes Metal Tornado - a movie I don't think is a SyFy original to be honest, but belongs to that specific genre and got released on the channel last years. What makes it interesting for me, as a trash aficionado, is that it's a Canadian production and produced by my favourite exploitation man: Pierre David! Yeah? You know him I hope? He produced Dolly Dearest and Scanner Cop - and yeah, a bunch of David Cronenberg's films. Good, I knew that you knew who he is...

Lou Diamond Philips is Michael Edwards, some blahablaha-scientist, living alone with a troubled teenage son. He's dating his co-worker Rebecca (Nicole de Boer) and that causes some friction between him and his son. Anyway! He's working on a new energy source: taking power from sun flares, sucking it down with some weird space machines into gigantic battery packs down on earth. Something like that. Of course something goes wrong and the energy creates a magnetic tornado who starts to eat every metal thing it can find and of course it's going towards Philadelphia! How can Michael and his team stop it? Will he make peace with his son? Will everyone hug each other in the end? Watch the movie and you'll see...

Seriously, for me - as a very forgiving fan of cheap TV movies - this was quite OK. There's absolutely NOTHING original with it. The story goes from one metal tornado-incident to another - just like a creature feature from SyFy, and Lou Diamond Philips is a good hero running around looking worried, sitting behind computers looking worried, hugging survivors looking worried. I like Lou, no doubt about it. He's good and even if this was an easy paycheck he delivers some acting - which is rare in these movies.

The effects are mostly very cheap (surprise!), but effective. The tornado itself looks silly like hell, but I can buy it just because the story never drags. This is a movie for people who wants to sleep when watching it, just to wake up when some disaster happens. I mean, I can't even pretend any of you will like it - but I like it and that's the most important thing with the movies here at Ninja Dixon!

I have an avid reader who always comments on my blog, and he/she wanted to read about a SyFy movie and here's one for you! Hope you enjoy it!