{"id":12214,"date":"2017-06-27T18:00:04","date_gmt":"2017-06-27T17:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=12214"},"modified":"2017-06-27T18:55:49","modified_gmt":"2017-06-27T17:55:49","slug":"film-blogathon-0717-tornado-warning-originally-alien-tornado","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=12214","title":{"rendered":"Film Blogathon 07\/17: Tornado Warning (originally: Alien Tornado)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Synopsis: Aliens are lured to Earth by a strange electronic signal, and they appear to you and me as destructive electromagnetic tornadoes (really!). Brilliant high school student (not a clich\u00e9, honest), together with her father and weather\/storm chaser blogger who is already involved in the study of these &#8216;tornadoes&#8217; are struggling against time to prevent further disasters and to disable the signal to make these destructive aliens\/pseudo tornadoes leave the planet.<\/p>\n<p>This film is CGI-effects a go-go.<\/p>\n<p>And not in a good way.<\/p>\n<p>The story is set in the American mid-west. Or possibly in South Carolina.<\/p>\n<p>An unpredicted tornado strikes a small farm, but it behaves like no tornado we&#8217;ve ever seen before.<\/p>\n<p>Not only that, but the Official US Government Weather Watchdog denies that the tornado-strike ever happened.<\/p>\n<p>There are a number of sub-plots designed to keep the viewer off guard:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The 17-year old daughter (who says of her dad &#8216;you&#8217;re so old&#8217;) who achieves the top 10 percentile at school and qualifies for a place at Chicago University<\/li>\n<li>Her single-parent dad who hasn&#8217;t insured the farm, and has spent his deceased ex-wife&#8217;s life insurance payout just meeting financial ends (and not been telling his daughter about all these financial dire straits, obv)<\/li>\n<li>The town cop who is from out of town and Who Has A Secret<\/li>\n<li>The Sinister Top Secret Government Installation just outside town<\/li>\n<li>The storm chaser with ten years experience who can just feel an instant barometric drop. Yeah, right, we&#8217;re all that gullible as well<\/li>\n<li>The sinister-looking blacked out SUVs linked to the same Secret Government Installation. Maybe<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Anyway, to the film.<\/p>\n<p>Despite the very low budget, which was probably almost the same amount as our weekly household shopping bill, and despite a very silly plot, Tornado Warning isn&#8217;t too bad.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, it is bad, yes.<\/p>\n<p>It just isn&#8217;t too bad.<\/p>\n<p>The lo-fi special effects look unconvincing, but that&#8217;s the point. You&#8217;re supposed to notice that those tornadoes aren&#8217;t as we know them.<\/p>\n<p>And the storyline has more cheese than the entire town of Cheddar.<\/p>\n<p>But the female lead (Stacey Asaro) is surprisingly strong in a role that most people would find challenging.<\/p>\n<p>Contrastingly, the head bad guy from the sinister SUVs is embarrassingly badly acted by David Jensen (no, not that one, another one).<\/p>\n<p>But despite the childish plot and the unavoidable potholes of bad acting, there are things to enjoy about this low-budget flick.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not too sure what they are yet, but I&#8217;ll let you know when I work out what they are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Synopsis: Aliens are lured to Earth by a strange electronic signal, and they appear to you and me as destructive electromagnetic tornadoes (really!). Brilliant high<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}