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Jeremy Clarke reviews
Pioneer LDCE
- Cat.no: PFLEB 35411 (CLV); PLFEC 35591 (CAV)
- Cert: PG
- Running time: 108 minutes
- Sides: 2 (CLV); 4 (CAV)
- Year: 1996
- Pressing: UK, 1997
- Chapters: 37 (1+16/19+1)
- Sound: Dolby Surround
- Widescreen: 2.35:1
- Price: £24.99 (CLV); £34.99 (CAV)
- Extras : Trailers: Twister (two of them) and Jurassic Park
Director:
- Jan De Bont
(Speed, Speed 2: Cruise Control)
Cast:
- Helen Hunt (Mad About You)
Bill Paxton (Aliens, Predator 2)
Jami Gertz (Queen’s Logic)
Cary Elwes (Liar Liar, The Jungle Book)
ATwister, as lovers of The Wizard Of Oz will know, is a tornado thatsnatches up objects in its path into the air and then dumps them downagain. The one that snatched Dorothy into the air was a cheap specialeffect in a wonderful film. The current movie, on the other hand, is theother way round: basically, it’s a rotten movie with awe-inspiringspecial effects. The cast here is not so much the workmanlike group ofAmerican actors playing uninspired characters as the incredible seriesof tornadoes which appear one after another, each seemingly darker andby inference more evil than its predecessor.
This may also be one of those rare movies (I can’t think of another)that requires a big (cinema) screen, with all the resolution that aprojected celluloid image can give these tornadoes, to really work itsmagic. On a telly, even with Dolby Surround kit connected, it seems tolose something. Don’t get me wrong – Pioneer’s transfer on this disc isup to their usual impeccable standard. Maybe it’s the sheer level ofdetail of tiny objects caught in a whirlwind that just doesn’ttranslate. Maybe it’s DS’ lack of rear dual audio channel separation. Ormaybe it’s simply that the movie doesn’t thrill a viewer anything likeas much second time around.
Approaching Twister with the usual criteria, it fails abysmally. Thefeeble plot, such as it is, concerns Paxton and ex-wife Hunt comingtogether leaving the former’s wife-to-be Gertz out in the cold. Theexcuse for this dreary excursion is that the first two characters areprofessional Twister chasers. Forget all this (and believe me, whenyou’re in the middle of some of the scenes with actors and no specialeffects, you’ll wish the producers had done exactly that) and insteadlook at the tornadoes themselves. Taken that way, the film works farbetter.
From the opening which pulls a father out of an underground shelterbefore the eyes of his horrified wife and child (the subject of side 1’s1.85:1 trailer before the main feature) through the extraordinarymangling of a Drive-In screen showing The Shining (the subject of side2’s 1.85:1 trailer after the main feature) to the dark devourer of afarmhouse in the final reel, the twisters themselves are awesome.
In CLV, you constantly want to rewatch these bits over and over (and wishyou have the more expensive, but one imagines infinitely better valuefor money, CAV version so you could check out the detail frame byframe). There is some marginally interesting Wizard of Oz subtextualstuff about a machine called Dorothy designed to be sucked up insidetornadoes, but it pales beside the sheer spectacle of cows, cars, oiltankers, trees and houses whisked up into the air and dropped back downagain, or monstrous columns of malevolent energy migrating wilfullytowards camera.
Chaptering is fine, fulfilling the major requirement of enabling instantaccess to the good parts and avoidance of the rest, while the passableside break (in the middle of one of the many car chases after a Twister)could have been better placed some 1 and a 1/2 minutes later, specificallyafter Dusty’s dialogue line, “this is the fun part, sweetheart”. On the strengthof the CLV disc, our advice would be to fork out the extra money to buythe CAV version as even in CLV the remote finger constantly itches topress the still frame button.
Film: 2/5
Special Effects (i.e. the twisters themselves) 5/5
Picture: 5/5
Sound: 5/5
Review copyright © Jeremy Clarke, 1997.Send e-mail to Jeremy Clarke
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Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.