Review of Ice Twisters (2009) by Timothy S — 08 Feb 2014

Most weather-related thrillers like "2012" glorify the destructive power of Mother Nature in all her grandeur, but that is clearly beyond the abilities of the makers of "Ice Twisters". Evidently, that kind of spectacle is not in the budget here, and what special effects that are here are lazily generated by computers and have no impact whatsoever.

In fact, the movie itself is so lazy that much of the run time here is dedicated to a lot of mindless chatter that makes such little sense that I tuned most of it out. And if it does actually make sense or have even a sliver of authenticity to it, the only people who would find it interesting are meteorologists.

The actors are bland and the dialogue is ridiculously serious, and all that might be worth a laugh or two if the rest of this wasn't so dull. Still, it's those awful effects that kill this faster than anything. "Twister", the big budget film this emulates, had the same hokey acting and dialogue, but at least it had the marvelously exciting tornado sequences that sold it. This is low rent in every aspect there is, and it isn't even fun in a bad way.

I suppose there's an audience out there who finds junk like this entertaining, but you can count me out of that club. In my opinion, CGI represented the death of the genre film because the effects look terrible and it made garbage like "Ice Twisters" a lot easier to produce. Anyone with a Mackintosh and a video camera could get a movie on the Sy Fy Channel.