User Reviews

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.

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...

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.

Upon seeing the trailer of this film I wasn't expecting too much, halfway through watching the film I realized this ain't bad. The nice mix of an interesting plot, occasional bouts of humor (like the flying chainsaw), believable acting, decent special effects, and many sequences that creates tension makes for an entertaining B movie.

I was very pleased with this film, I got my moneys worth and this film exceeded my expectations.

I cant believe this film was released ! I was bitterly disappointed in this film and was shocked at the severe poor quality of the script and acting, and not to mention the sets they created such as their control centre computer room which seemed like it had been thrown together for a kids game show with wires hanging everywhere and switches and routers not connected anywhere, and the scene where Rebbecca tries to fix the switch and it wasn't even plugged in on the back lol which made me laugh so much, special effects were pants and the ending was shocking and typically American aimed !! and if i wanted to see so much cheese i would have gone to my local cheese curling factory.

"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!!

I would like to rate this at 7.5, but since there are few reviews and it needs a slight boost, I am rounding it up to an 8. Compared to other disaster blockbusters of spurious scientific plausibility, I actually dug this movie! The special effects, although I am not an animator or anything and love cool effects no matter what generation of film making they are from (e.g. Star Trek TOS & Star Wars), were actually rather cool.

Lou Diamond Philips did a good job, and I thought the soundtrack was reasonably well done as well. In fact, in my opinion, the soundtrack exceeded B-movie standards. Don't get me wrong - this was not a Burwell, or a Zimmerman soundtrack but hey - it was pretty good!!! Also, a lot of the scenes had great composition visually, and were very clear and detailed. I don't know that much about the technical aspects of filming motion pictures, but I do recall that there had been some advances in the 80s that allowed for a greater range of color or something, but that resulted in an overall darker feel. This movie was apparently made with the latest filming technologies and the quality of the footage produced was extremely good in my opinion.

Overall, the movie had a good solid plot, and its pace was quite good. I would have to say that both the director and the composer worked well together in this regard, and that if anything could be improved, with regard to the current budget of the film, that it would be the overall script.

SPOILERS: The humorous bits were things like when this garden hose hovers in the air like a cobra & when a girl in high heels helps lift a concrete pylon off of some kid's leg a little too easily (something like that would weigh easily over 200 pounds!).

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.

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.

Obvious plot. Ham acting. Terrible special effects. Awful one liners. 'What happens in this office stays in this office'. 'The Vortex has been destroyed... but it was too late for Paris'. And the Pièce de résistance..... Old computer graphics to notify you which part of the world the Metal Tornado is currently trashing.

What is there not to like? This is an excellent Sci Fi film with all the ingredients of a great B movie. The only issue I have is that the director may not know of his genius and some of the direction was not meant to bring out the best wooden acting I've seen for a while. Days of our lives type pauses...... And then cut to the Helios World Office in France for an update on the current situation there..... Oh no not the Eiffel Tower! Independence Day bonus points for that.

Nicole de Boer and LDP may need a new agent. Totally out of place in this film.

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!

Upon seeing the film, I can't help but feel that it's been given a bad rap. Is it an excellently-made film? Of course not. However, it's far from the worst film I've ever seen. The story is by and large pretty solid--despite the stereotypical CEO-who-doesn't-care-and-therefore-puts-a-lot-of-people-in-danger.

Nicole deBoer is, without a doubt, one of the best actresses I've ever seen. I've been a fan of hers with her wonderful portrayal as Ezri Dax in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and her role in The Dead Zone is played with an intense passion and emotion, which pulls the viewer into empathy with Sarah Bannerman. In "Metal Tornado", she's the female lead (IMDB, I feel, needs to re-arrange the cast names a bit...). She gives a good, solid performance. However...she doesn't have much to do, as far as character growth and inner conflict--which is what she excels at, as "Dead Zone" fans know well. As such, while Nicole's "magic" is there, its certainly not in full force--her character's written as rather two-dimensional, and Nicole isn't given much opportunity to flesh out the role.

The male lead is also pretty good, as is his character's son. However...a lot of the other actors are clearly amateurs, and don't really seem to know what they're doing. The special effects are also pretty cringe-inducing--it screams to the viewer, "THIS WAS COMPUTER GENERATED!!!" Finally, the name is frankly lame--ranking up there with "Snakes On A Plane" and "Cowboys And Aliens".

One gets the feeling, that, with a Hollywood budget (and with it, better effects and MUCH better secondary/minor actors) and marketing plan, this film would've excelled as a superb disaster flick.