Cyclone!

• Author: Rothenberg, Robert S.

Tornadoes seem to have beaten out dinosaurs as the latest hot thrill theme, with audiences flocking to a blockbuster big-screen film ("Twister"), a Fox television network movie of the week ("Tornado"), and CBS's latest rerun of the venerable "Wizard of Oz" whisking Dorothy and Toto through the sky. This video documentary's views of the real thing make Hollywood movie magic a pale imitation of nature's fury and the havoc these storms can wreak.

The numbers of tornado occurrences are mind-boggling, with more than 500,000 hitting the U.S. this century alone, inflicting losses of over 10,000 lives and millions of dollars in property damage. Prime destruction seems to be reserved for Tornado Alley, the swath of land through the Great Plains that annually is hit hardest by the deadly storms. The video follows Howard Bluestein, a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, and his crew of "stormchasers" as they sped out with truckfuls of exotic equipment on April 26, 1991, to record and measure a series of twisters that destroyed or damaged 1,700 homes in Kansas and Oklahoma. Seeing the total annihilation such storms can inflict on humans, animals, vehicles, buildings, and trees is awe-inspiring.

As if this isn't enough, the over-all rubric "cyclone" manages to encompass typhoons, such as the 1970 storm which left more than 300,000 dead in Bangladesh, and hurricanes as well as tornadoes, all of which are triggered by...