Oh, the weather outside is frightful… but these movies are so delightful. It’s November; soon it’s going to be cold and icy, and odds are, you’re going to be spending most of your time inside very soon. If you feel yourself start to get a little bit of cabin fever, cursing the very weather that condemned you to your home-y prison, try popping in one of the following movie to remind you that no matter how bad the weather gets, it can always get worse.

Twister

It’s said that there are three kinds of stories: man vs. man, man vs. machine, and Bill Paxton vs. tornadoes. This film uses some of the best in blurry ’90s CG to show the destructive effects a twister can have on homes, theater screens and cows. Battling these sucky forces of nature are Bill “Game Over Man” Paxton and Helen “Mad About You” Hunt, two ragtag weather nerds leading a group of equally ragtag weather nerds in their quest to better understand these windy vortexes of doom.

Weather ostensibly serves as the film’s antagonist, though the writers felt motivated to include a human enemy in the form of Cary Elwes’ character, a rich scientist who isn’t in it for the science, he’s in it for the money. While Team Hunxton’s heart is in the right place, I’ve never quite understood their animosity towards Elwes and his crew of black-clad scientists. So what if they’re “in it for the money”? Researching tornadoes is a dangerous job! If they want to risk their necks to study them, they deserve to get paid a lot to do it.

The Perfect Storm

Ignoring warnings of an impending superstorm, George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg go fishing and end up in a craptastically bad situation because of it. Marky Mark and Danny Ocean have to work with their crew to survive, battling monstrous tidal waves, torrential rains, and John C. Reilly’s tendency to mug for the camera. Ultimately, only Wahlberg’s character survives, proving true the old adage: “If you go fishing with George Clooney, you’re probably going to die.”

The Day After Tomorrow

If there’s one thing moviemaker Roland Emmerich seems to enjoy doing, it’s screwing over the Earth. Aliens blew up much of it in Independence Day, it got pretty much destroyed in 2012, and it got turned into an ice cube in The Day After Tomorrow. When it comes to extreme weather, The Day After Tomorrow is the extremest to the max. It has hurricanes, flash-freezing, and tsunamis out the wazoo, and keeps a high-speed barrage of shiny special effects moving to help distract the audience from the relatively threadbare storyline and character development. Rumor has it that The Day After Tomorrow was the culmination of a series of ideas Emmerich had about bad weather movies. Some of his rejected titles include Hard Rain, a movie about Tommy Lee Jones battling an afternoon of heavy rainfall, It Might Snow, where Sigourney Weaver plays a Navy Seal on shore leave who has to keep her Florida town calm when they think it might snow there, and Piranhail, where mutant piranhas get sucked up into a storm system and come raining down as icy shards of teeth and death. The only man who can stop them is marine biologist/meteorologist Dean Cain.