Stonados ! ? ! ?

Yep, Steve got bored. It's the only explanation I can think of. He scrolled through the TV upcoming offerings menu, and actually recorded that movie. I'd never heard of it. Sharknados, yes. Stonados, no. But there it was, sitting on the DVD, waiting to be watched.

It's not exactly that I was bored too, but let's go with that as my excuse. Plus I needed a little mindless laughter before heading off to bed. And mindless is what we both got.

The opening scene set the tone. A tornado/waterspout formed out in the harbor from out of absolutely nothing, and for the record, at the end of the scene, vanished into clear blue skies as well. Keep in mind it stayed well offshore. From there, well away from the "suck zone", it managed to wrest away from its resting site below ground and without disturbing the railing or surrounding roof standing on marble columns,  Plymouth Rock. The actual rock. With 1620 inscribed on it. That Plymouth Rock.

Plus a tour guide. Mind you, she had the railing between her and the stonado, was gripping it and could easily have wound more than fingers around the railing as the openings were more than adequate to entwine whole legs and arms through to cling on with. Not only that, but starting on the landward side, she was pulled off it as if the railing rotated 180 degrees without moving, legs pointing out to sea and suddenly up, out, and into the funnel she went. Poof.

Twenty minutes later our beloved Plymouth Rock dropped on top of a basketball player doing some one-on-one with a buddy on a neighborhood court. Splat. But no blood, of course. The crater formed without a nod to the principles of physics (hey, go visit Meteor Crater in Arizona if you want the skinny on craters), but why spoil what they had going?

We never did find out what happened to our tour guide.

Waterspouts kept forming. Of course, without more and worse, there was no need for a movie. They not only formed from nothing, though clouds were eventually brought in, but whirled in straight cylinders of rigidly uniform diameter, rather than varying undulating columns like in real life, and started throwing rocks. All at land of course. All at the same angle. They did a great job of landing squarely on top of people you didn't care for, again with no blood. There was one instance of one taking out an obnoxious lady yelling at one of our "good guys", knocking her into a concrete seawall with two hands wiggling outside the rock edges like clock hands at 10:00 and 2:00 showing at the edges of the rock. No blood, of course. 

Perhaps it wasn't in the budget.

But wiggling. Strangely satisfying, considering how annoying she'd been.

I'm thinking the budget limitations hit the second part of the movie harder than the first. The rocks got smaller, maybe just 4 gallon size, but new kinds of rocks - a "new element" - started forming. Something in a gobbledy-gook explanation claimed that ozone formed them inside the mega storm, which was in turn caused by undersea volcanos. I'm sure the writers of this flick counted on the scientific illiteracy of typical Americans to sell this concept, while it basically showed theirs. To show these new rocks, the props department designed lumpy round boulders coated with iridescent plastic wrap, torched holes in the plastic, then coated them with fake frost. If you still needed help knowing which were the new kind of rocks, they rocked. Literally, puns or no, sitting on the ground these things rocked back and forth. This difference became important to tell because the ones rocking would finally explode. Unstable, you see.

Not enough drama already, you see.

When the authorities finally woke up and took action, the order went out for everybody to evacuate Boston and keep off the streets. Yep, simultaneously. And of course this major city was successfully evacuated - except for the people left, of course - in minutes without fuss or panic.

Much of the plot was completely predictable. The best of the good guys survived, of curse. The bratty teenager reformed and the family reunited, happily ever after. The authorities didn't believe our hero-experts at first, allowing for more mayhem and deaths. Before resolving the crisis, the worst of those not only stopped our guys with a half-assed apology, but did it after the 1 minute timer on the nuclear bomb had been started. However, a big rock eliminated her on the spot so the heroes could proceed. It didn't matter that they'd been delayed, however, as the final four seconds before the nuke exploded solving all their problems took about 35 seconds anyway.

Oh, yeah, that all needed a spoiler alert, didn't it? Because you're gonna watch, right?

Oops. My bad.

One of the advantages of having a DVR is the ability to pause while somebody goes to rummage for sandwich fixings. I happened to be the one sitting waiting, staring at the last frame of a commercial that wound up fitting perfectly with this movie. It told us to call them for a digital brochure!

Uhhhhh....