Better Late Then Never

A Brilliant Conflict

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Not only does nothing happen, nothing even almost happens. Theres a big tornado, everybody gets informed in time and no body dies. Some pretty funny bad acting though.

This is not bad for a TV movie, the special effects and acting overall are pretty good compared to other tornado TV movies, this film is up there with Night of the Twisters since it keeps you glued to the screen wandering about what's about to happen next.If there are two things that stood out in this film is the use of unused footage from Twister (which I've found very interesting) and the ridiculousness of putting a disease containment facility in Tornado Alley. I also have to ask the question of why the producers used similar looking tornadoes in each sequence, did they run out of budget or was there a tight deadline? I found the similar tornadoes to be distracting.In retrospect, this film is good and does have some re-watch value.

Adherence to current meteorological theory and good storm-chasing practices was not a hallmark of Twister. The science was atrocious and real storm chasers doing the bonehead things that our heroes did would've ended up smeared across vast stretches of the Great Plains. However, it more than made up for its factual flaws by being one hell of a great roller-coaster ride.And in comparison to 'Devil Winds', Twister is Citizen Kane, and a National Weather Service documentary to boot.It isn't so much that the science is bad in Devil Winds.It's non-existent to the point of being insulting to one's intelligence.It isn't bad enough that an allegedly professional meteorologist attempts escaping a poorly-CGI'd tornado by trying to out-run it. For the record: if one is caught on the road, drive at a right angle to the tornado, so that as quickly as possible it's not heading toward you anymore—it's passing behind you and moving away.But no. Not only does Our Hero™ drive directly away from the digital funnel cloud—which is about forty or fifty feet behind him at most—it follows him around an s-curve in the road.Let me repeat that: it *follows* the *curve* in the *road*.Upon reaching his destination, the tornado takes a twenty minute coffee break. It has been some fifteen meters behind him the whole time, and when he stops the car and gets out to protect an endangered building, the titular Devil Wind is suddenly nowhere to be seen. Why? Maybe it stopped off for a Slurpee. It would make as much sense as anything else in this movie.There's more, but it all seems so very irrelevant. It's all formulaic and predictable. It should come as no surprise that the building where the tornado's coffee break occurs is an Incredibly Dangerous Disease Storage Center at which the obligatory Estranged Offspring® of Our Hero™ works—and of which, of course, the boss is a crook.About the only cliché left out was having it built on an ancient Indian burial ground. Sheesh.This was first run on Pax (now ION), so unsurprisingly the Estranged Offspring® and Our Hero™ have by the end of the movie a Tearful Reconciliation© wherein All Is Forgiven (pat. pend.). And It couldn't have been more perfectly telegraphed by Samuel F.B. Morse himself.In short, Devil Winds is poorly thought out, poorly written, and poorly executed, and a bigger waste of a disc than anything outside of an AOL free trial.Save this for a MST3K Home Game.

This could be one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I rented it a few nights ago with no knowledge of this movie. I understand TV movies aren't the highest budgeted in the world, but I'm fairly sure if they'd used stock footage of tornadoes instead of special effects the movie would have been a lot better.Basically(possible spoilers) the movie is about a man who loses his wife to a tornado in Oklahoma. He moves to Seattle, WA, and his daughter grows and goes to school back in Oklahoma. 10 years after the tornado kills his wife, he comes back to see his daughter, who has now grown up, graduate college(I think). The man has since given up his storm chasing days, but when he gets to Oklahoma and is reunited with his old storm chasing buddy he soon rekindles his spirit for tracking storms. The man soon realizes another storm is going to produce killer tornadoes again. He's right. Eventually this one tornado, an F5, comes after him. His daughter works in a disease control facility and the building isn't up to code. It's now up to him to overcome his dispute with his daughter and save all of central Oklahoma.Seriously, the worst special effects in the world. Also, the music was ripped off of Twister, only they played the music through a Nintendo and called it original. If you're looking for a good tornado movie, I'd recommend Twister. If you want one that was made for TV I'd recommend the Night of the Twisters. It's not great, but it's better then Devil Winds.