Tornado Valley (2009)

good back-story, and good acting

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

I have seen worse than Twister Valley, but I did think that it was an awful movie with little if anything to redeem it. Visually, once you get past the choppy editing and the dully-lit production values, what really sank Twister Valley were the tornado effects, which are terribly cheap in look and perhaps even the worst tornado effects I've seen. The music fails to give any life or even tension to the film, likewise with the muffled sound effects. Add to that clichéd characters(even for Lifetime), stilted writing and a story that is predictable and maudlin and you have a furthermore bad movie. But the lack of atmosphere, suspense or tension also hindered it, as well as the acting, which is unnatural and not even showing any real sense of fright or any other emotion to what's happening. All in all, awful. 2/10 Bethany Cox

WOW!.. from the get go u will think.... "what the.." then... "get off n run stupid!..." then.. "just grab her little butt n run!!..." THEN......"why the hell am I still watching this?!.." The way the storm came over the trees WITHOUT displacing them in any kind of way is laughable! Maybe this is a comedy... Who knows.I do know this movie is lame from the beginning. I'd be embarrassed to be associated with this movie. I assume this is a 'foot in the door' for some new young actors to get their face out there or for some desperate actor taking on whatever role they can to grab some money to make ends meet.. Cause DAMN!!! really???!!XP

I'll give this one a (huh?) out of ten.In terms of plot, we have another Twister clone, only without the budget, and without the F/X, and apparently without a screenwriter who's seen the last 17 Twister clones already made. Compared to most Lifetime fare, Tornado Valley really doesn't stand out from the pack, good or bad. It's a bland, formulaic, run of the mill childhood tragedy, adult baggage, dysfunctional family flick that keeps Hallmark and Lifetime from being 24 hour infomercial channels.Now for the good stuff. We have the Storm Protection Center in Norman, Oklahoma (in reality, the Storm Prediction Center in Norman), a name which got some giggles from me. What, they have a national storm shelter in Norman? "Hey, there's a bad storm, let's head up the Storm Protection Center." Then there's Matilda, a device that looks like a plasma globe from Spencer's Gifts at the mall, which can not only help with predicting when and where tornadoes will, but will also prevent "billions of dollars in collateral damage". Huh? So, I'm to believe that Matilda can teleport crops, forests, and office buildings out of the path of a tornado? Maybe it's the funky patterns in Matilda's plasma globe that will distract the tornado from hitting people and buildings? Remember to keep an eye out for the eco-nadoes. No trees, grass, or small forest animals were injured in the making of Tornado Valley, because these tornadoes only eat humans, houses, and tractors, refuse to drop any hail or rain, and are only slightly windier than a ceiling fan. Could be Matilda working subtly from the start...

I wasn't really gripped by this film and my attention wandered. I think the plot goes something like this: Little girl who lost her mother to a tornado grows up to be a TV weather person. She returns home and deals with the past and the present. At the same time the government is tentatively setting up an agency to monitor tornadoes. It all comes together in the end for big tornado that once again threatens the now grown up girl and her loved ones.Bland TV movie like story is a great deal of talk bookended by a tornado at either end. For me the film was lost when the tornadoes turned out to be rather weak CGI effects that never really look threatening. One would have thought that a film about tornadoes would have spent some money on making them seem menacing, but thats not the case. The rest of the film is okay but you really won't care because there is no pay off with a threatening storm.I'm take a pass.