VOYEURS of violent weather have a double treat in store for them tonight. Firstly, the movie Twister opens, as the saying goes "at a cinema near you" after much promotional ado and razzmatazz. It concerns, as everyone must know by now, what is portrayed to be the greatest tornado of all time, or certainly the most vicious and fictitious ever to hit the State of Oklahoma.
The blurb, without hyperbole it must be said, describes tornadoes as "breathtaking in their beauty and unspeakable in their potential ruin." The story line apparently concerns two rival groups of scientists, each of whom wants to be the first to gauge the vital statistics of the big wind. "To do so," we are told, "they must put themselves directly in the path of the marauding monster, stay always just ahead of the swirling twister, and anticipate its every erratic move." Hovering in the background are those strange, uniquely American eccentrics, the "storm chasers" - enthusiastic amateurs mesmerised by these phenomena and who relish for its own sake the flow of adrenaline that comes with close contact with a deadly whirlwind.
Home after watching Twister you will be just in time to catch The Hurricane on Channel 4 at half past midnight. Hurricanes, as we know, are much larger than tornadoes. They are oceanic in origin and may be more than a hundred miles in diameter, in contrast to tornadoes, which are inland, small scale and localised phenomena.
A hurricane, too, has a lifetime of a week or more, during which it may travel perhaps 1,000 miles, ultimately affecting a very large area and causing death tolls and damage bills that may be very high indeed over an extensive region. A tornado, on the other hand, while much more vicious and bringing winds of up to 300 mph, forms and dissipates quickly with a life span of anything from several minutes to an hour or two: it is rarely more than a few hundred yards across, and therefore confines its destructive power, albeit massive, to a relatively short and narrow path in one locality.
The Hurricane, we are told, features a sarong clad Dorothy Lamour. Weather watchers, however, will be more interested to see how the eponymous cyclone is brought to life on screen, bearing in mind that one critic, at least, has expressed the view that "the climactic storm in this celebrated South Seas drama is still one of the most thrilling sequences in movie history". If the special effects in Twister and The Hurricane do not compare, remember that the latter black and white production was made all of 60 years ago in 1937.