For the last couple of years, The Asylum really seems to be resting on the laurels of its Debbie Gibson v. Tiffany monster movie successes. I love The Asylum, but Super Cyclone is a lackluster, lazy effort chock full of bad movie moments. It's obvious that the people who made this movie just did not care.

Whoever was in charge of marketing obviously didn't even watch the movie. If you go to The Asylum's very own website and pull up this title, the description refers to the threat of a super cyclone that threatens "the entire American eastern seaboard." Uh, small problem -- the story actually takes place on the west coast of California. Adding injury to insult, the film itself presents one radar image of the big storm that shows Florida. I guess the director figured that no one would notice.

Do you know who else didn't care? The editor. This is a total hack and slash job. You have cameras constantly shifting from scenes of wind and rainstorms to sunny days. At one point a truck stops on the road, and the passengers get out amidst scrub brush nowhere near a road. My favorite shot, though, comes when one of our "heroes" tries to cross a tree resting above a sinkhole -- it's blatantly obvious that he's on perfectly flat ground.

The trouble begins when an offshore oil rig hits a deep pocket of methane. That superheats the water, which -- as we all know -- causes some kind of vortex that gives birth to a storm 10 times larger than Hurricane Katrina. Dr. Jenna Sparks (Ming-Na Wen), who is some kind of atmospheric scientist/military adviser working on a way to defuse storms, and some other forgettable heroes can't do anything to help once they get there, and they spend most of the movie trying to get back to Camp Pendleton so that they can suggest a couple of ludicrous means for stopping the storm before the entire West Coast is destroyed. Neither wind nor rain nor hail nor flaming hail nor oil downpours will stop them.

For some reason, no one in Washington, D.C., seems to have any say in matters of such emergencies, as some colonel is running the whole show himself.

I could go on and on about all of the things that make this film so bad, but I think you get the picture already. I will add that the CGI effects are amateurish even by The Asylum standards, and the acting is flat and ponderous all the way around. I could not have cared less if any of these characters lived or died. It is films such as this that give The Asylum such a bad name.