Supercell: Low-Budget Twister Film Has its Moments - None of Which Belong to Anne Heche or Alec Baldwin

By Jim Slotek

Rating: C

This has not been the best week for the memory of Anne Heche. The actress, who died in an inferno in August after driving her car into a house, was left out of the In Memoriam segment at the 95th Academy Awards (along with the likes of Robert Blake and Paul Sorvino).

And this week also sees the streaming release of the tornado movie Supercell, one of her last projects. She shares billing with Alec Baldwin, currently charged with involuntary manslaughter for a discharged firearm on the set of the movie Rust.

All of which only goes to show how much can happen between “That’s a wrap!” and release.

The movie, directed by Herbert James Winterstern, wears its low-budget emulation of Twister on its sleeve (there’s even a scene where someone does a Google search, and the first name that comes up is that of the late Twister star Bill Paxton).

But to say that Heche is in the movie is not to imply that she’s into it. The actress is in some weird kind of auto-pilot where there is no connection to the character’s emotions. She displays the same level of intensity when her storm-chaser husband (Richard Gunn) is lost in a supercell as when she’s talking to her son William (Daniel Diemer) at home.

She also delivers sentences with odd inflections, as if the director didn’t have time to do a retake.

Whatever was going there, she and her character are all but extraneous.

Which is too bad, because, the acting aside, Supercell is a good example of what can be done these days with a limited budget and savvy use of mood and affordable effects. It doesn’t set out to be Sharknado-esque cheese. Heck, it even takes the time to explain what a supercell is. A scene with baseball-sized hail is frighteningly realistic, and the movie leans more on the awe-inspiring sight of clouds piling up on themselves, building power.

Seeing the process of what’s coming turns out to be pretty gripping. Kudos to Andrew Jeric for the cinematography.

Some years after his dad’s unfortunate encounter, we meet William as a 16-year-old high schooler. (And like most movie teenagers, Canadian actor Diemer - who gives Supercell’s one decent performance – is in his mid-twenties.)

William is obsessed with his dad’s attempts to invent a high-tech tornado detector, and can be seen atop his high school studying the clouds. The only person who doesn’t think he’s crazy is his schoolmate Harper (Jordan Kristine Seamón), who, besides being a contrived love interest, knows how to use Google, and unearths past secrets about William’s dad’s research.

Unfortunately, his dad’s storm-chasing outfit has been bought out by an unprincipled investor named Zane Rogers (Baldwin), who has turned the research company into a storm-chasing tourism enterprise.

That’s right, Baldwin’s over-acted character negligently puts the people in his charge in harm’s way, where they are liable to be killed. Awkward.

So it is that William and Harper join his uncle Roy (Skeet Ulrich) and Zane in this tourist enterprise, it being the closest he can get to the biggest and baddest storm cells. His mother is dead-set against it (or at least the dialogue she reads says so).

Ahead of them lies one of the most powerful storm cells on record, much bigger than the one that all but destroyed Joplin, Missouri in 2011.

As I say, technically, Supercell is not a bad movie. But it’s dragged down by the economics that insist a low-budget movie needs some minor celebrity voltage. It’s at its best when people aren’t talking.

Supercell. Directed by Herbert James Winterstern. Starring Daniel Diemer, Alec Baldwin and Anne Heche. Available to stream Friday, March 17 on digital streaming and On Demand.