"Anna's Storm" combines the elements of an ER episode with the generic disaster film. A shower of cluster bombs lands on a small town in Colorado, and the threat of Big Bertha arriving means that the everyone in the community will be doomed.

There are no villains in this film other than the indiscriminate forces of the universe. Led by Mayor Anna Davenport, the people of this provincial outpost must rally to support one another in what might be the remaining minutes of their lives.

As appropriate for a Lifetime film, the local police are completely incompetent in their response to the calamity. The crusty old police chief's only accomplishment during the crisis is to give blood at the hospital! Seth, the son of the chief, is in love with the mayor's daughter, Emily. The chief is also running for mayor, hoping to unseat Anna.

The filmmakers set up unlimited opportunities to bring out the kleenex. Anna and her husband "Doc" lost their little boy Ricky when he was run over by a careless truck driver. The family has never been the same and Anna is now planning to move to Florida. Daughter Emily is distraught at having to move away from her friends and her boyfriend Seth. "Doc" has not worked in months and now is brought in to heroically participate in triage at the hospital.

The cast was excellent in conveying the human side of disaster and the ability of the townspeople to work together during the disaster. Mayor Anna took to the airwaves with her radio broadcasts. Though not at the level of Winston Churchill's oratory, she was nonetheless inspirational in quoting from the Bible, reminding her fellow citizens that "two are better than one" when it comes to working as a team.

For a television film, the production values were excellent. Everyone will have a favorite scene to recall from this film. My personal choice is when the quick-thinking Emily hatches an idea to lift a fallen tree off of Seth's leg by tying a rope to a motor vehicle, then backing up to raise the tree. As a non-driver, she required a crash course in how to use a stick shift. She passed her driving test with flying colors!

Sure, I enjoy watch natural catastrophe movies, even though the vast majority of them are questionable. But I hadn't seen the 2007 movie "Anna's Storm" (aka "Hell's Rain") before now in 2020, so of course I sat down to watch it - even though the title was a rather lousy one.

Granted, I didn't have much of any expectations to the movie. Which was good, because writers Steven B. Frank and Julie Ferber Frank weren't exactly coming up with anything groundbreaking to the genre. Nor were director Kristoffer Tabori making anything outstanding from whatever material was written.

The movie felt more like a mixture of small town politics mixed with dysfunctional family bonds, and spiced off with some natural disaster. In my opinion, the movie focused way too little on the natural disaster, and it didn't really play all that much of a focal point of the movie.

Was it predictable? You betcha! Especially the ending, it was just atrocious, and it brought the movie down one rating for me. I would have rated it a four out of ten stars, but ended up on a three star rating.

The acting in the movie was adequate for the most parts, but I was having difficulties with the lead actress Sheree J. Wilson, as she just was unable to put on a believable performance throughout the entire movie.

If you enjoy a natural disaster movie that involves meteors or meteorites, then there are far better ones readily available and of much older date even. This movie was just not outstanding.

I have just seen this film on the Sci-fi channel. I was pleasantly surprised both by the quality of the acting and the strength of the story.

The decision to focus on the characters relationships and the every day decisions that can effect us was a brave one. I thought the image of Anna's dead son throughout the film both moving and thought provoking. It was also very interesting to have a film where the ending was really in doubt and that these characters were left on their own by the authorities, a reflection perhaps on events after Hurricane Katrina? All in all a well made, carefully thought out film without the usual stereotypes. Would it have been better with a different ending?