Marshal Phipps 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.

unbrokenmetal Trying to find a new, much more powerful way of using solar energy, scientists are setting free a magnetic field which roams across the country, whirling around every kind of metal thing, until the effect is a metal tornado which destroys towns almost like a very big lawnmower. Every time the hero is asked just how scientific the whole thing is, he says something like "No time to explain now", and starts to run. So much for that. Following the clichés of the genre, there is a rebellious genius, warning that a catastrophe is near, and an evil business man who wants to hush the whole thing up even at the cost of some lives. With increasing power of the storm, they have to work together and find a possible solution, though.Yes, it's a typical genre movie going by the checklist what's got to be in there, but still it was better than I expected. It was wise just to put a town in Pennsylvania in danger, not having to save the whole world this time. A parallel event in Paris is also described, the Eiffel tower being a perfect choice for any catastrophe related to magnetism, but since all the main characters are in the US, this string of the story remains pale. Even if the special effects are very, very cheap - such as rattling a shelf with tin cans to show the tornado is approaching - it looks okay for a TV production. Always keep in mind we are talking about small budget TV here, comparisons to Hollywood blockbusters with their enormous technical capabilities are therefore neither reasonable nor fair. Taking that into consideration, I vote 6 of 10.

Dan Ashley (DanLives1980) 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...

Eric_M_Blake 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.