`TWISTER' CREATES A VORTEX OF THRILLS, TERROR.

Byline: Amy Dawes Daily News Film Critic

Get ready to be blown out of your seat. Not since Dorothy and Toto got whisked out of Kansas has a tornado kicked off such a memorable time at the movies. Where the 1939 classic excelled in imagination, ``Twister'' is a high-velocity thrill ride that puts the emphasis on sheer adrenaline and spectacular special effects.

The creativity begins with the titles, block letters that crumble and scatter as an ill wind takes them away.

We're then introduced to the dark, roiling skies over Oklahoma, which take on the same foreboding menace as the murky ocean waters in ``Jaws.''

As presented by director Jan De Bont (``Speed'') and cinematographer Jack N. Green (``Unforgiven''), the Midwestern skies are a growling, malevolent force ready to pounce without warning on the plain folks below.

And pounce they do, over and over.

The movie starts with a deadly twister that rips the roof off a storm shelter and sucks a young girl's father into oblivion.

Flash forward to the present, where the girl has become a brash, nervy meteorologist (Helen Hunt) obsessed with conquering the beast that took her father.

A kind of human tornado herself, Jo (Hunt) has managed to drive off her former husband (Bill Paxton), a gifted storm-chaser who has given it up to become a weatherman and marry a therapist (Jami Gertz). Jo has come up with a ploy to lure him back - she makes him drive out to the field to pick up the divorce papers on a day when the biggest storm in half a century is expected to drop multiple twisters onto their turf.

There's another hook, too - Jo and her team of university-funded storm chasers - basically, Midwestern adrenaline junkies whose brand of kicks involves getting as close as possible to death-dealing cyclones - have come up with a gadget, cleverly named the Dorothy - that, if pitched into the path of a tornado, could break down the behavior patterns of the twister and help scientists develop an early-warning system that could save lives.

Does it make much sense, given that tornadoes are notoriously unpredictable and unique? Who cares? We're here for the action.

And Bill is no more able to resist it than we are. Dragging along his wide-eyed fiancee (Gertz), he joins Jo and her low-tech hooligans as they race against a competing team of overfinanced corporate geeks (led by Cary Elwes) to try to make meteorological history.

That means racing directly into the path of the cyclone - through irrigation ditches, cornfields and other bone-rattling terrain - so they can toss their big can of ping-pong balls, or whatever it is, into the monster's maw.

Of course, they keep messing it up, so they have to try again with bigger and bigger twisters, which keep on barreling down Tornado Alley like bowling balls, pelting them with debris.

Soon it's not just branches and farm buildings that are being levitated - there's a bawling cow that circulates through the air, a house and several pieces of heavy farm equipment that drop from the sky, and an oil tanker that hurtles toward Jo and Bill's truck from a distance and then explodes into a wall of fire.

All this movie lacks is 3-D glasses.

The filmmakers - who include writers Michael Crichton (``Jurassic Park'') and his wife, Anne-Marie Martin, and executive producer Steven Spielberg - make this a movie about the thrill of the hunt. It's like ``Jaws,'' except that the deadly Big One, the legendary great white, is an ``F-5''-force tornado, the mother of all windstorms.

Inspired by the work of real-life Midwest storm-chasers who work with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Oklahoma, the movie was shot during storm season in Oklahoma and Iowa.

Second-unit crews captured many actual twisters and cut that footage in with computer-generated imagery from Industrial Light and Magic. Director De Bont, who introduced the concept of speed to the Los Angeles freeway system in his debut film, outdoes himself with exciting camera angles and in-your-face action.

The casting is also on target. Hunt (TV's ``Mad About You,'') makes a terrifically assured and complicated action heroine, and her high-voltage screen relationship with Paxton rings true. Gertz brings just the right comic mix of nervousness and nerve to her role as the outsider looking in.

The supporting cast - including Philip Seymour Hoffman as a joy-riding rock 'n' roll storm chaser, and Lois Smith as Jo's creative aunt Meg - also adds color and verve.

It doesn't take a weatherman to predict gale-force worldwide grosses for this movie, possibly the most accessible mainstream thriller since ``Jurassic Park.'' Don't wait for video - this experience deserves the widest screen and best sound system available.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Twister'' (PG-13; mild language, intense action and destruction).

The stars: Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jami Gertz, Cary Elwes, Lois Smith.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Jan De Bont. Written by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin. Produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Ian Bryce and Michael Crichton. Executive producers, Steven Spielberg, Walter Parkes, Laurie MacDonald and Gerald R. Molen. Released by Warner Bros.

Running time: One hour, 44 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Four Stars.