Wednesday, November 30, 2022

#31DaysOfChristmas: Christmas Twister

 


Watched on: Christmas Plus (Roku)
Duration: 1 hour 26 minutes
Originally aired: December 16, 2012
Directed by: Peter Sullivan
Starring: Casper Van Dien, Victoria Pratt, and Richard Burgi
Please see IMDb for all cast and crew info. 

Synopsis

In a small Texas town during the holiday season, Ethan Walker, a meteorologist and part-time professor working at the local university studying tornadoes, is woken in the middle of the night for a call about a tornado that has just hit. His team is assembling at the lab and he needs to report. His wife Addison, a TV news reporter, is also summoned to work to do a piece on the tornado for the morning news. Ethan realizes the conditions are ripe for more tornadoes. Although he and his wife have been having marriage problems, he calls her and begs her to put the warning out, but the station's slick meteorologist thinks it was an isolated incident. Addison tries to get him to change his mind, but he won't -- because it's Christmas time and he does not want to be a Scrooge with some hypothetical news. When a tornado levels the Walker's house on Christmas Eve, Ethan and his wife must come together to help save others and rescue their missing children.

Review

I picked this movie hoping that it would give me some Christmas magic with the thrills. Spoiler alert, it did not. Like Die Hard, this is an action movie, NOT a Christmas movie. Simply being set on Christmas day isn't enough to make it a Christmas movie, and this one doesn't even have any snow (Die Hard at least has snow). 

Christmas Twister was pretty much like a mash-up of Twister and Day After Tomorrow. The natural disaster is a major series of tornados like Twister, and there's a sleazy weatherman who doesn't know his asshole from his elbow, with the added element of "his kids are out there!" Seriously, the meteorologist who figured out that it would be a major storm day spent most of the movie tracking down his family. And I'm pretty sure this family is cursed because tornados just happened to hit the exact locations where each member of his family was, including the family dog. The odds of that happening are astronomically low considering that it was three separate twisters. 

Early on there was a great corny joke that made me groan/laugh. But it was pretty much downhill from there. I would definitely give this B movie status. It wasn't bad, but it definitely wasn't good. And it certainly wasn't an actual Christmas movie despite the title. 

Rating



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