‘Twister’ and Unusually Precise Tornado IPA

Just like this Hazy IPA from Turning Point Beer, the tornadoes in ‘Twister’ are unusually precise.

The Movie: Storm-based action adventure movie / 1996 / Warner Bros. – Amblin Entertainment – Universal Pictures

The Beer: Triple New England IPA / 10.2% ABV / Turning Point Beer – Bedford, TX

Twister is a lot of fun.

Big storm movies often are. But what makes this one different is that it’s the story of a group of people who are actually chasing the storm rather than the other way around. It was one of my favorite movies to watch on summer nights, and as a kid in New Jersey it shaped my whole view of “tornado alley.”

By the time I reached adulthood, I did manage to figure out that, no, tornadoes don’t just happen every hour or so in the region. And, no, there probably isn’t a Bill Paxton running around Oklahoma that magically knows what tornadoes are “thinking” despite what the radar says. Also, it’s not cool to just drive through people’s corn fields all the time and smash down the crops willy nilly.

I still thought every low-hanging cloud from Missouri to eastern Colorado was gonna be a tornado when I drove cross-country for the first time in 2013. Never happened, and that’s for the best.

Twister’s never quite left my mind though. Even though I hadn’t watched it in years, it came to mind the other week when I saw Unusually Precise Tornado IPA from Texas’ Turning Point Beer.

New England-style IPAs or “Hazy IPAs” like this didn’t even exist back in 1996, but who cares?! This brew’s got its own whirlwind in the form of hops. A trifecta of Citra, Mosaic, and Vic Secret make for some fresh-squeezed flavors of OJ and grapefruit, plus a nice little berry medley towards the finish. There’s a little piney bitterness in this pillowy body, but for the most part it’s all juice.

Which is really incredible, considering it’s 10.2%!

Such a beer requires slow, steady sipping, so I figured why not fire up Twister along with it?

With the exception of a very early-CGI space satellite in opening scene and eerie guitar wailing over the end credits that’d be more at home in Lethal Weapon, Twister holds up remarkably well all these years later. The tornadoes are as drawn-out and dramatized as can be, but they look impressively real. And making the beer pairing even more fitting, the twisters of the movie do seem to always strike precisely and with a vengeance (watch out, Aunt Meg, the mean tornado knows where you live!)

The plot is also better than I remembered. It’s no Oscar material, but it never feels forced even at its most ridiculous moments. And of course, Bill Paxton (RIP) always managed to be super watchable no matter the role. He’s Bill here (omg, the same name!) in Twister, opposite Helen Hunt as Jo. Can these two exes get back together? I don’t really care, but the increasingly large vortexes they’re chasing make it fun to watch it all play out!

Of all the characters though, I didn’t realize until now the importance of Jamie Gertz’s Dr. Melissa Reeves. The clinical sex therapist and fiancee to Bill is the personified barrier preventing Bill and Jo from rekindling their love, so she easily could have been the villain (one of them, anyway — Cary Elwes plays evil storm chasing competitor, Jonas). Her real purpose, however, is to serve as the audience’s eyes into the crazy world of storm chasing.

See, Dr. Melissa is pretty great. In addition to being aforementioned sex therapist (who is so devoted to her patients she takes their calls on the road – “She did not marry your penis. Oh okay, alright, she didn’t only marry your penis.”), the good doctor is relatively open-minded about jumping into storm chasing adventures. But she’s still an outsider, learning more as she goes along. By having her learn the Fujita scale or the backstory of the other characters, the movie successfully avoids beating the audience over the head with exposition.

It’s also just nice to see that this is one of those rare movies, even by modern standards, that actually makes the “other woman” side character interesting and non-villainous. Dr. Melissa even verges on three-dimensional half the time.

Besides, she’s the only one having real human reactions to each of these incredibly dangerous funnels.

Sure, there’s that moment in the diner where she calls out Jo point-blank for still being in love with Bill and using the whole Dorothy experiment as an attempt to get him back, but it’s not like she’s wrong. Dr. Melissa calls it like she sees it.

Alas, when the plot no longer needs her to serve as audience liaison, Dr. Melissa gets her heart broken while overhearing Bill on the radio profess his continuing love for Jo. Cool as a sad-yet-empowered cucumber, she finishes her onscreen time with “Oh, don’t worry about me. I know my way home.”

Jo and Bill of course go on to succeed with getting an F5 tornado to eat their science experiment (because that’s how it works — the twisters keep increasing in size and strength so our heroes can flaunt their bravery. Don’t ask too many questions). But as I take another sip of Turning Point’s Unusually Precise Tornado, it’s not them I’m toasting. Cheers to you, Dr. Melissa. As we say in the ’90s, you go girl!