Night of the Twisters is a 1996 made-for-television disaster film that was directed by Timothy Bond. The film premiered on The Family Channel (now Freeform) on February 11, 1996, as the cable channel's first original movie (and appeared on the channel until 2004, under its successor brands Fox Family and ABC Family).
Filmed in Kleinburg, Ontario, Canada, it is based loosely on the 1984 young-adult novel of the same title by Ivy Ruckman, itself a semi-fictionalized account of an outbreak of seven tornadoes that struck Grand Island, Nebraska on June 3, 1980, which killed five people and injured 134 others; the film adaptation, however, is set in the fictional Nebraska town of Blainsworth, which serves as a stand-in for Grand Island. The film centers on a family's struggle to survive a night as a bizarre tornado-producing supercell thunderstorm tracks into and becomes stationary over their town.
Plot
The film's prologue takes place at 1:16 p.m. in an area of rural farmland in Dannebrog, Nebraska on an unspecified date in the Fall of 1996. Bob Iverson, a storm chaser with the Kansas State Tornado Center relaying information to the National Weather Service on a chase assignment, is driving down a country road to track a bizarre supercell thunderstorm. While observing the storm, Bob spots a tornado touching down almost a mile south of his location; he warns a family living nearby, right as the family's daughter Sarah, arrives home from school, about the oncoming twister, which sends them running into their root cellar just before it destroys their farm.
Meanwhile, in Blainsworth, Nebraska ( southwest of Dannebrog), aspiring teenage artist Dan Hatch, who is constantly being pushed by his stepfather, Jack, to be an athlete, participates in a bicycle race and damages his bike; Jack pushes Danny into finishing the race on his bum bike, where he falls behind the other racers. Much to his luck, he wins a new bike in a raffle held by a local bank. While trying out his new bike, Dan and his best friend Arthur Darlington run into Arthur's two sisters, Stacey (whom Dan is infatuated with) and Ronnie Vae, while at the park. Dan and Arthur arrive home as the former's mother Laura is preparing dinner, when she also asks Dan to tend to his baby half-brother, Ryan. Later, Laura's sister, Dan's aunt Jenny, calls to inform her that they have been assigned to fill-in shifts as waitresses at the Salty Dawg, the local diner where they both work. Because Jack will not have enough time to take Laura to work, Jenny volunteers to take her.
At 3:37 p.m., while continuing to track the severe weather creeping toward the town, Bob decides to head southwest into Blainsworth, as Stan, the meteorologist Bob is radioing to, is astonished at the rogue anticyclonic spring-like weather pattern for the fall; while there, Bob meets Laura while getting some coffee at the diner. That evening, when Jack arrives home and sits down to watch TV, the show he is watching is interrupted by a KHAS-12 weather update, reporting a tornado northwest of Blainsworth, and a tornado warning has been issued for St. Paul, Dannebrog and rural Howard County, Nebraska. Soon after Jack leaves to check on his mother, Dan's grandmother Belle, who was asleep in her rocking chair when he phoned her, tornado sirens suddenly blare throughout town, only to cut off abruptly as Dan goes to get Ryan from his crib. The eerie stillness outside afterward suddenly gives way to a violent tornado that approaches Blainsworth's Capital Heights neighborhood, with the sucking noises emitting from the drains notifying Dan and Arthur of its pending arrival; they and Ryan take cover in the basement bathroom's shower tub as the twister starts to obliterate the Hatch residence.
After Dan and Arthur escape from the basement of the leveled house through the collapsing floor beams from the first floor, and look in awe of the rubble that was once the Hatches' home, Arthur runs into Stacey and Ronnie Vae, who both survived the twister themselves in the Darlington's home (their parents were out of town on a trip back home to California at the time the storm hit). As Dan struggles to find his own family, Laura and Jenny are trapped inside the Salty Dawg (as they were taking cover inside, due to Jenny's 1992 Buick Skylark malfunctioning when she went to pick up Laura), which also was destroyed by one of the tornadoes. Dan and Stacey then go save Belle, at her farm; the two teenagers find Belle underneath wooden boards blown onto her from off of the partially damaged barn near her house (which itself survived intact).