Preparing for St Jude: Top five big screen storms

Those who pay attention to the news may have noticed all the excitement brewing in Blighty today. Our tiny island is preparing to be ravaged by St Jude - a storm of reasonably epic, hurricane-force proportions that's set to hit tonight.

[Yahoo! News: Britain braced for hurricane-speed winds]

But while the rest of the UK are bulk-buying baked beans and coming up with clever weather-related puns on Twitter, we at Yahoo! Movies UK are preparing to batten down the hatches with our DVD collection.

Here are our carefully chosen top five perfectly appropriate stormy movies to get us through the next 24 hours…

The Perfect Storm
Yes, it's an obvious choice, but that doesn't make Wolfgang Petersen's action/adventure any less worthy of a watch.

George Clooney stars as fishing boat captain Billy Tyne, whose crew find themselves trapped in an overwhelming maelstrom. What follows is intense, non-stop action as the boatmen decide to keep fishing despite the oncoming squall. While the story and characterisation might leave a little to be desired, the storm itself is the undisputed star of this movie, with terrific and terrifying set pieces as the men fight for survival.

Twister
While the combination of romantic comedy and disaster movie makes for a rather confusing plot, Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton are nonetheless perfectly likeable as a storm chaser couple on the brink of divorce.

But the story is really nothing more than white noise that serves as background to five (count 'em) amazing tornadoes that tear across the screen destroying everything in their path - not even Oklahoma's poor cattle are safe. Packed full of impressive special effects, its a spectacle of the highest order.

The Day After Tomorrow
Roland Emmerich's weather-beaten blockbuster is, of course, absolute nonsense from start to finish. But it's fun nonsense, and that's really all that matters.

Dennis Quaid is the scientist whose claims of an imminent ice age are readily ignored by the White House. Jake Gyllenhall is his brainiac son, who's stranded in New York when disaster strikes. Both do what they can with the awkwardness of it all, but neither actor can hold a torch to the stunning special effects involved in bringing America to its knees by way of hurricanes, tidal waves, howling blizzards and other ridiculousness. Like we said - it's fun.

The Wizard of Oz
Victor Fleming's 1939 flick is iconic for many reasons - not least, the cyclone that carries Kansas farm girl Dorothy to the magical land of Oz.

To paraphrase Professor Marvel, it's a whopper of a twister that despite only comprising around four minutes of screen time still terrifies as our heroine makes her futile attempt to outrun it, only to be swept up in the vortex along with her house and her dog.

While we're at it, the storm in 2013 follow-up Oz The Great and Powerful is also done rather beautifully, as James Franco's conman is whipped from his black and white world in a hot air ballon and unceremoniously dumped in a magical land of colour.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Much as we love a bit of thunder and lightning, if St Jude decides to gift us with raining burgers and hailing cake we'll be a happy bunch come Tuesday morning.

Sadly Flint Lockwood, inventor of a machine that turns water into food, doesn't exist in real life so we'll have to make do with stuffing our faces in front of this bizarre, but highly enjoyable animation that has the wit and smarts to match the size of its spaghetti tornado.

Speaking of which, check out the trailer for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 below.

[Buy Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs on DVD]

What did we miss? Tell us your favourite stormy movie in the comments below...