We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Tornadoes and a Howling double feature.
TWISTERS (2024)
The blockbuster disaster film Twister and its TV movie mockbuster Tornado had a big impact on me when they were released in 1996. As a kid who grew up in Ohio and Indiana, I spent many nights of my childhood terrified that a tornado was going to come roaring through the spot where I was living and seeking shelter, so watching those movies was like confronting a fear... and they captured my imagination so well that I spent a portion of the summer of ‘96 writing my own trilogy of stories about a group of storm chasers much like the storm chasers in Twister and Tornado. That trilogy was called Cyclone. I don’t remember much about it, but I know those stories were packed with tornado action sequences, just like Twister and Tornado.
Twister left me hoping to see a sequel, ideally one with Helen Hunt and, most importantly, Bill Paxton back in the lead roles. Sadly, Paxton passed away in 2017, so we never got that ideal version of a Twister sequel. Still, when it was announced that a vaguely connected new movie called Twisters was in the works, I was glad to hear that we were going to get the chance to return to the world of Twister in some way, and it was guaranteed that I was going to be watching this new movie. Since I saw Twister during its theatrical run, I made sure to do the same for Twisters... and while watching the movie, I was glad to find that director Lee Isaac Chung delivered a film that feels very much like a companion piece to the movie Jan de Bont directed nearly thirty years ago. It feels like we don’t get enough Hollywood productions that are shot in the American countryside – and really show off that countryside - anymore, so watching Twisters and seeing its scenes play out in Oklahoma locations was a welcome sight.
No characters from Twister were brought back in the story crafted by Joseph Kosinski and Mark L. Smith, but the scientific device called Dorothy does return in the opening sequence. Twister was all about storm chasers trying to get a Dorothy device into the path of a tornado, the idea being that once this device is inside the tornado it will open up and release hundreds of sensors that will provide data on exactly how a tornado works. Four Dorothys were put to use in Twister, and at the beginning of Twisters a fifth Dorothy is being used by a storm chaser named Javi (Anthony Ramos), who is working with four others: Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), her boyfriend Jeb (Daryl McCormack), and their pals Addy (Kiernan Shipka) and Praveen (Nik Dodani). While Javi is hoping to get Dorothy info, Kate and the others are attempting to release barrels of sodium polyacrylate solution into a tornado, the hope being that this will be a way to make tornadoes dissipate. Things go terribly wrong. The sodium polyacrylate solution seems to have no effect on the tornado, which turns out to be larger than expected and causes the deaths of Jeb, Addy, and Praveen.
Jump ahead five years. Kate is working as a meteorologist in New York City. Then Javi shows up and asks her to go to Oklahoma with him on a mission to set up a triangle of radars around a tornado so they can get a scan of it. Kate agrees to help him out, for one week only. And during that week, these characters are going to get a whole lot of opportunities to try to set up their radars around tornadoes. Just like Twister, Twisters is largely a series of tornado action sequences with a brief amount of downtime between each storm.
Javi is working alongside a stuffy fellow played by new Superman David Corenswet in a company called Storm Par, and their serious business attempts to surround tornadoes with radar equipment is often disrupted by YouTuber Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), who calls himself a Tornado Wrangler and has a team that includes characters played by Brandon Perea, Sasha Lane, Tunde Adebimpe, and Katy O’Brian. This group, which is being profiled by journalist Ben (Harry Hadden-Paton), treats storm chasing as a party, complete with loud music and fireworks. But, as it turns out, Tyler might not be the shallow man-child some may expect him to be... in fact, he might even be a more noble person than the people behind Storm Par.
Twisters was pretty much exactly the movie I was hoping and expecting it would be (in this time without Bill Paxton), and if someone liked Twister, I think chances are high that they’ll enjoy Twisters... especially since it’s nearly the same movie. Twisters covers a lot of the same ground that Twister did. You have the heroine with a tragic, tornado-related past. There’s the storm chaser returning to storm chasing after some time away. Rival groups of chasers; one stuck-up, one wild. There are even similar action beats. For example, Twister featured a tornado hitting a drive-in that was showing The Shining. Twisters features a tornado hitting a movie theatre that’s showing Universal’s Frankenstein.
Of course, once a movie establishes a certain kind of action, you expect a follow-up to have some bigger action. Chung does bring some bigger action to the screen, like a scene where a tornado hits an oil refinery, but keeps things reasonable. There’s a danger, when you’re dealing with CGI tornadoes, of going over-the-top and getting ridiculously big. Chung keeps things from crossing the line into absurdity, making sure Twisters never jumps the shark(nado) and remains a good time at the movies.
THE MARSUPIALS: THE HOWLING III (1987) and THE HOWLING: NEW MOON RISING (1995) – hosted by Joe Bob Briggs
The Howling franchise isn’t highly regarded, and the two worst entries in the whole run may be The Marsupials: The Howling III and the seventh film, The Howling: New Moon Rising - and anyone who tuned in to the TNT cable station on February 20th in 1999 had the opportunity to watch legendary movie host Joe Bob Briggs show these two stinkers back-to-back. That was probably seen as an unlucky turn of events for a lot of viewers... and yet there are people like me who are such fans of Joe Bob Briggs and of wasting our time with bad movies, that we’ll still go back and watch this double feature of werewolf turkeys twenty-five years later.
Joe Bob started this episode of his TNT show Monstervision by going on a humorous rant about wedding traditions and oddball relationship pairings, then segues to the Howling III introduction with the baffling revelation that he considers Howling III to be one of the best Howling sequels, this information going hand-in-hand with the knowledge that he also has a soft spot for The Howling: New Moon Rising, which he describes as one of the looniest Howling sequels. When it comes time to give his ratings, however, Joe Bob gives Howling III a perfect score of four stars (he loves it because it’s so goofy), while New Moon Rising only manages to get a half star. Turns out, Joe Bob may count Howling II as the worst of the bunch... and it is pretty terrible, too.
Directed by Philippe Mora, The Howling III tells the story of a young woman named Jerboa (Imogen Annesley), who escapes from a village in the Australian Outback that’s inhabited by werewolves and gets involved with the production of a horror movie in Sydney. An anthropologist, a military strike force, and a Russian ballerina werewolf also get involved in the story – and if you want to know what I think about the movie itself, my write-up from 2017 can be read HERE. I don’t like Howling III very much, so this viewing was all about getting the chance to experience it with Joe Bob Briggs hosting segments.
During his hosting segments, Joe Bob talks about the cast, the FX artist who created the werewolf effects, and speaks on the attractiveness of Imogen Annesley, who he compares to Milla Jovovich. He’s baffled by the moment where a man isn’t disgusted by the sight of a little marsupial werewolf baby, he’s impressed by the inclusion of the Russian ballerina werewolf, who he says may be one of the most original characters in horror film history, and he confirms that the Tasmanian wolf referenced in the story did exist. There’s also a segment where Rusty the Mail Girl brings him a piece of mail from an incarcerated fellow who refers to Rusty as Bunny in his letter.
Once the Australian adventure is over, the double feature moves on to the story of a motorcycle enthusiast who rides into the desert community of Pioneertown and has a good time hanging out with the locals at a honky-tonk saloon. There is some werewolf stuff going on as well, but The Howling: New Moon Rising is mainly about spending time in a saloon and doing some line-dancing. (You can read my full write-up HERE.)
Joe Bob helps us sit through this snoozefest by talking about the cast, most of whom lived in the vicinity of Pioneertown and were playing variations of themselves, so they earned their only screen acting credit on this film. He ponders if the budget could have possibly been any higher than $150, pointing out that any moment that looks like it cost more than $1 to bring to the screen is stock footage from previous Howling sequels. Joe Bob marvels at the fact that hardly anything happens in the movie, describes it as a musical comedy werewolf movie where they forgot to include the werewolf, and questions TNT’s decision to show this thing at all. But as the movie goes on, you can see that he starts to get charmed by the whole thing, and even goes so far as to compare it to his beloved Bigfoot docudrama The Legend of Boggy Creek, which is also a leisurely paced movie where a lot of small town locals were cast as themselves.
The third and seventh Howling movies are not good, but if you’re going to watch them, it’s nice to have Joe Bob Briggs as your guide.
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