Twister's Revenge!

Trucking Hell

Twister's Revenge!
USA 1988 Directed by Bill Rebane
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers but... really?

Okay... wow. This is going to be a short review. I’ve seen some terrible films in my time but this is easily one of the worst, almost beating out Harlem Nights as the film I’d most want to walk out of. Bill Rebane’s ‘comedy action’ movie is the last of the films in the Weird Wyoming - The Bill Rebane Collection that Arrow put out and, yeah, I’d have to go on record as saying that the majority of this box set is terrible. The Game was watchable and The Alpha Incident was a film I’d probably watch again but, not much to recommend in this one. Not least, Twister’s Revenge, which manages to fail to deliver on both the action and comedy that I’m assuming it was trying for.

The plot, such as it is, tells of a young couple, Dave (played by Dean West) and Sherry (played by Meredith Orr). They play those big, US monster truck shows... you know, those trucks with the raised chassis and the humongous tyres? He’s the driver and she is the computer programmer and fixer for the new artificial intelligence installed in their new truck, Mr. Twister (so there’s half of the title explained... you’re on your own trying to find any ‘revenge’ in this movie though). So Mr. Twister, the monster truck, can think for himself, talk to them and he is their friend, it would seem.

Anyway, since the whole kit is worth 200,000 dollars, three wiley but low in intelligence redneck thugs who work at the local scrap yard, called Kelly (David Alan Smith), Bear (R. Richardson Luka) and Dutch (Jay Gjernes), decide to steal the truck and all its gear. Bear is the really dumb one and is pretty much the less upright, male equivalent of the kind of character played by Regina Carrol in Blazing Stewardesses (and you can read my review of that one here). The first third of the movie is the thieves attempting and failing to steal both the truck and the van full of computer equipment. So they kidnap Sherry on her wedding day and tie her up next to some TNT in an old abandoned mine shaft, holding her to ransom for a few days. So Dave and Mr. Twister go out of their way to make life hell for the three crooks and rescue Sherry... which is the next two thirds of the movie.

And it’s mostly action but it’s fairly low budget and consists mostly of long, extended and very dull car vs truck chases (culminating in a similarly extended tank vs truck sequence) which... well, it’s just boring. And all along the three are trying to be as funny as they can for the audience and... yeah, I wasn’t laughing along at this one I can tell you. I just felt insulted and that maybe Arrow should be paying me to have to sit through this one.

Even a terrible song and dance scene can’t save the picture and, while the director does try to get creative once, in a very brief shot of the main male protagonist taken so that it’s looking through a spider’s web in front of his face, there’s not really a great deal of interesting stuff going on visually in this one either. And it’s not the most carefully filmed movie I’ve seen. For instance, in the big tank scene where it’s just Dave and the three crooks running and rolling along in the deserted junkyard, there’s a spot where a crew member can be easily seen in the distance, walking along and not minding what’s going on near the front of the screen.

Another point of interest is the use of the truck as a comically intimidating entity, where the background music, including a backing beat, alludes and finally, very briefly, breaks out into the John Williams Jaws theme at one point, before hastily doing it own thing, presumably to evade anyone having to pay any copyright.

All in all, Twister’s Revenge is certainly a low note to end on in the Weird Wyoming boxed set and I won’t be recommending this film to anyone anytime soon. The action scenes, which are plentiful and maybe all that the film is made up of are mind numbingly boring on their own and... yeah... those are the highlights. I hate to give a bad review but, yeah, I won’t be watching this one again. A short review for a film that I’m hoping will leave my headspace sometime soon. Maybe I’ve exorcised the memory with this review.