Welcome back to 1 out of 5 – Would Recommend, where we’re doing our best to think cool thoughts. To help with that, we’re watching the 2009 TV disaster movie Ice Twisters.
What’s The Plot?
That seems…unscientific.
A government cloud seeding experiment goes slightly wrong and creates a series of freak ice storms that culminate in freezing tornadoes! It’s up to a popular science fiction writer (who is obviously a more badass version of Michael Crichton) and a pair of government weather scientists to solve the problem, along with some pretty 20-somethings who clearly have romantic tension. Boilerplate type stuff for movies of this type.
Who Made This Beautiful Garbage?
Steven R. Monroe, a director whose most notable films are the remake of I Spit on Your Grave and its sequel, I Spit on Your Grave 2. While I have not seen those flicks, the late Roger Ebert (whose film analysis I rather respect) had very unkind things to say about the first of them. He is, however, at least a competent professional.
Five Reasons to See It
- Totally-Not-Michael-Crichton is played by Mark Moses, who is best known for regular roles on Desperate Housewives and Mad Men (for which he won a SAG award). He’s had dozens of guest shots on TV series over his then-25 year career and he’s unusually good at acting for leading this kind of feature.
Heavens to betsy, it’s a real, hard working, decent actor.
- There’s a short sequence of an SUV pulling a K turn on a blocked road and driving away has three obvious cuts in it. No other editing boo-boos stick out, leaving this unnecessary one really perplexing.
- The Ice Twisters, created by seeding clouds with silver iodide (real science, BTW), don’t just freeze you to death – they give you silver poisoning and turn you blue (also real science)!
- A member of the research team resents the author character, a man he’s never met and who is unaware of his existence, of stealing the idea for a bestselling novel from him. I’d condemn this as stupid, but this sort of thing has been the subject of real-life lawsuits.
Scientific accuracy in SyFy movies is almost unheard of.
- “I tell ya, you can’t write it better than that.” – A screenwriter voicing an inflated ego through his character or natural dialogue? You decide!
Recommendation
It’s the exact kind of barely passable schlock you expect out of made for TV disaster movies: the plot is nonsense, the dialogue is overwrought, and the special effects aren’t very good. What saves this one is a professional director and a solid actor in the lead, rendering it an entertaining enough bit of background noise for a too-hot summer day.
Pictured: How we get new cargo planes.
NEXT WEEK: We’ll get back to enjoying something truly so-bad-its-good, 2006’s D.O.A.: Dead or Alive.
