Chasing Killer Storms

When I was a kid, playing Twister was just a fun way to pass a few hours on a Sunday afternoon. Now I have learned that some guys with mobile TV's, laptop computers and video cameras play Twister by chasing after "killer storms" week after week. They do it, presumably, to get their clips in "World's Scariest Storms Pt. 7" on Fox TV. They watch the weather channel for the same reason Saddam Hussein watches CNN, to find out when and where they're going to get blown away. Their favorite phrase is "whoa, let's get out of here!", followed by lots of handheld camera work as they run back to their sub compact cars and speed off. It is also obvious, from this tape, that driving into killer storms is not easy, as the storms tend not to take paved roads on their seasonal trips between trailer parks. (So, when you can't drive into the eye of a storm, buy stock footage of it from "World's Scariest Storms Pt. 6"!) Chasing Killer Storms begins by following a team of tornado hunters across the Midwest, with modest results, then quickly meanders into a story about meteorologists flying into the eye of Hurricane Bertha, and finally wanders into a discussion of the greenhouse effect. What exactly happened to our team of crack videographers is left to the imagination. I would have liked the narrator to simply find a toupee lying on the plains of Oklahoma somewhere, and say "the answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind...", but no such luck, we're the ones left to twist. Structured too loosely to survive the eye of this blowhard, and using stock footage of storms we've all seen before, Chasing Killer Storms is not a necessary purchase. Aud: J, H, P. (R. Ray)