Project Terrible: Metal Tornado (2011)

Wahoo! More and more terrible movies abound with this Project Terrible round! I'm a poet and I don't even know it! I digress. This round I'm getting movies from Alec at Mondo Bizarro, Maynard at Maynard's Horror Movie Diary, and Robert at Gaming Creatively. I chose Robert's movie to review first because, well, I was actually kind of excited about watching a movie called Metal Tornado. Who wouldn't be? But sadly, I found it to be not as terrible as it should have been.

While trying to find a solution to the world's energy crisis, a research facility called Helios World inadvertently creates a massive energy vortex that is also magnetic, attracting every metal object in its path. Two of the astrophysicists responsible for the phenomenon must now try to stop it before it reaches one of America's major cities.

Oh, now doesn't that just sound glorious? You're thinking horrible acting, incredibly cheesy dialogue, people in ridiculous situations, and some dumbass looking tornado with cars and shit in it, right? But here you would be wrong, because while Metal Tornado is definitely no Gone With the Wind, it's actually not all that bad, even though it really should be, just so it can be a part of that elite group of awesomely awful SyFy movies. The problem is that the movie actually takes itself very seriously, so seriously that I could only pick out one line of dialogue that was cheesy. ONE. And I was really hoping for so much more.

I'm not saying that this movie isn't a pointless pile of poop because for the most part it is, I'm just saying that it's not as bad as Piranhaconda or Spring Break Shark Attack. But they sure got some grand thespians to carry the film, that's for sure - Lou Diamond Phillips is Michael Edwards, one of the people who creates the vortex, and his co-worker and girlfriend is played by The Dead Zone's Nicole de Boer. Their characters are uninteresting, but not annoying. The only annoying person the requisite corporate guy in charge who refuses at first to believe that his experiment went wrong and is only concerned about the money involved. Sadly, he eventually comes around to admitting the truth and doesn't come to a bad end like most of these kinds of characters do.

You know, now that I think of it, I don't think anybody actually dies in this movie. There is one girl who probably dies because she is inside her vehicle when it gets sucked into the vortex, but other than that, everyone lives. There are no campy or violent deaths from runaway metal objects. The movie sets up a lot of these situations - a chainsaw pulled from a guy's hands, a woman's own mobile home almost hitting her, and various farm tools attacking a guy in a barn - but there is never any follow-through by way of ridiculous deaths for these people. Honestly, Metal Tornado is pretty dull all around - definitely not on par with some of the fabulous shit that SyFy has created in the past.

I bet one thing you are just DYING to know about is how this metal tornado - or magnetic vortex, as they say in the movie - was created. Surprisingly, I actually understand their pseudo-scientific explanation behind this, despite it all probably being complete bullshit. The Helios World people capture the energy of solar flares using huge panels attached to satellites in space. The satellites then beam the energy to the facility's collection area where it can be stored underground as electricity basically in huge batteries. Or something like that. No idea if any of that is actually plausible but they sure as shit make it sound real in the movie, so I'm going with it. The magnetic vortex happened when their containment areas got overloaded and some energy escaped. Sure. I'm so sure that that could actually happen.

So Metal Tornado is not as bad as it could be - it strangely lingers on the precipice of actually being somewhat good, even. It's a time-waster if nothing else, and one of the better projects to come from SyFy so I have to give it props for that. More terrible movies to come!