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Why so much hype?

Best movie of this year hands down!

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The SyFy folks are nothing if not predictable. All you have to do is look at the director's credits to see what you're in for here. And as to the writer of this nonsense, Rafael Jordan, he has absolutely no shame. He's got a couple dozen of these horrid movies to his credit. I presume someone is paying him to do it, but I can't imagine why.Tornadoes tossing boulders. OK. Well, I guess they had to make something, and this is actually no more insipid than Ragin' Cajun Redneck Gators or Chupacabra vs. the Alamo. Do we call this a job well done? If you were aiming to make a stupid movie, then absolutely yes.Kudos to all involved here. This movie is a mess and the makers just have to live with that.

After the surprise success of Asylum's SHARKNADO, the current trend for these B-movie disaster/monster combos seems to be tornadoes mixed with something else. STONADOS has to be one of the silliest of these ideas, as it's a film where tornadoes are mixed with stones due to some ancient prophecy or some such. It's all nonsense anyway, because tons of people are killed when tornadoes lift debris off the ground and chuck it at them, so why bother with this whole stone angle?Needless to say that this SyFy Channel production is pretty much devoid of any kind of originality or sense. It stars B-movie stalwart Sebastian Spence (CRASH SITE: A FAMILY IN DANGER) as a journalist who makes it his job to chase storms; inevitably he teams up with the usual group of officials/scientists/investigators to try to track down the menace before too many people are killed. William B. Davis (BEHEMOTH) also shows up as an old timer with a budgie in one of the film's many random sub-plots.STONADOS is a mish-mash of disaster staples, all of them played out enthusiastically, if without much in the way of skill or discernible talent on the part of those involved. The CGI effects aren't quite bottom of the barrel stuff here, but they're still a far cry from those in THE AVENGERS, for instance. STONADOS is very much par for the course for this sub-genre.

Better than most of SYFY channel made movies. The acting is actually good. Maybe I missed it but what is up with the little (?) brother. He seems kind of needy and not all there. The special effects are okay. I don't understand why the rocks blow up but hey I didn't write the script. You can see certain occurrences coming before they happen though. Like the lighthouse keeper getting killed by his own lighthouse when it is hit by, gee, a stonado and collapses on him. Then there is the rebellious teenage daughter, you can tell she is going to do something to upset pop. Told to stay home with baby brudder she takes him and they go to a football game. So of course the stonados hit the stadium. Now after the day before when the harbor and such were destroyed, who in their right mind would still hold an outdoor event? Well the NFL after JFK, but who else? A decent enough movie for rainy day.

Stonados is one of those movies where you can tell from the title and plot-line that it is not a film to be taken seriously, and that is true of most SyFy original movies actually. It is like Sharknado as a disaster movie with giant stones, except for this viewer it was nowhere near as entertaining. Stonados does have a fun title idea and title, as well as an opening scene that is tense and to the point. The acting is fitting within the genre and the story itself, it is not great but none of it is anywhere near Tara Reid terrible(even the actor playing the man who tries to flirt with Joe's daughter and he was the weak link of the cast), at least the actors actually seem to be concerned about the situation. Stonados does have a very drab look to it though, and a vast majority of the special effects are poorly-textured and hurried-looking, and even for really big rocks the stones seemed out of proportion. There is a lot of dramatic music and there are one too many times where it does get too much and rather sluggish-sounding, while the script has a lot of terrible one-liners, technobabble that has a very make-it-up-as-you-go-along-without-checking-that-it-makes-sense vibe and one of the biggest and most clichéd understatements in any recent movie in "I think we might have ourselves a very big problem." The story had potential but was thinly structured and very predictably and ridiculously told. The science was wacky that you had the feeling that there was little research or scientific background behind the scenes, and then there's so many plot holes the size of large craters to fill a novel listing them. And there was little sense of threat(there were flashes but it was never consistent), thrills or suspense. Sharknado was a long way from great but was fun and kind of a guilty pleasure. That feeling is less frequent and more controlled in Stonados, but actually the movie also tries too hard to be dramatic and comes across as very overly-serious that it also forgets to be fun consequently and is devoid of almost all the ingredients characteristic of a disaster movie. The death scenes are few and between and what there is silly and very tame, again with little threat or sense of danger, and the father-daughter relationship amongst other relationships and dramatic conflicts dissolve into ham-fisted melodrama with no believability factor. The characters, excluding for a second that they are unlikeable stereotypes, we never do get to know, the pacing gets bogged down by the overly-serious tone and the direction also falls flat. Overall, Stonados is the sort of movie that we shouldn't take too seriously but when the movie itself takes itself too seriously it is difficult not to follow suit although you can't take what is thrown at you at face value. This is a case of trying too hard rather than not trying, but while there is far worse out there despite being from those behind Sharknado it wasn't very entertaining for me, sorry. 3/10 Bethany Cox