Storm Warning

 (2007)

by Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

This Aussie film follows a familiar horror formula. The normal set-up is: on a stormy night illuminated by lightning, the car of the yuppie couple breaks down on the side of the road and they have to take refuge in the dilapidated old mansion/castle/farmhouse, where they encounter either sadists or supernatural forces. Storm Warning's only minor variation on that theme comes from the fact that the handsome and well scrubbed young couple (Aussie Robert Taylor and Frenchwoman Nadia Fares) is out sailing instead of driving, and their boat breaks down when they get lost in a serpentine mangrove swamp. The farmhouse where they seek refuge turns out to be populated by the usual angry inbred half-wits who appear in just about every American horror film these days. You'd think that this family consisted of the official movie cliché version of hygiene-challenged West Virginians, except that they are differentiated by their Aussie twangs.

Their house is quite an imaginative creation. It looks like a combination of a haunted mansion, the filthy lair of a murderous madman, and the sets for the Cabinet of Dr Caligari. The film's creators deliberately took the style of this house over-the-top to make it walk the borderline between horrifyingly grotesque and hilariously macabre. That particular sense of crazed élan lifted the film above the routine and gave the locale a surreal quality that a more credible outlaw lair would have lacked.

The yuppies are tortured for the next hour or so by three fellows who are obviously the product of many generations of brother-sister intermarriage, but the yokels make the mistake of leaving the yuppies in the barn with a bunch of tools and fishing gear, whereupon the city folks make like MacGyver and devise some assorted weapons and Rube Goldberg contraptions to snare the unwitting rurals.

The film had exhausted the novelty appeal of the bizarre set design and was absolutely running on empty until the yuppies started to fight back, and then the filmmakers finally came up with enough creative ideas to lift Storm Warning to a level above the genre norm. The deaths of the three rednecks are some of the grisliest, nastiest, bloodiest, ugliest gore I've ever seen on screen. One of them, for example, gets suspended from the ceiling in a web of fishing lines and big barbed hooks which rip the flesh from his face, gouge his eyes ... well, you get the idea. Another one goes to meet his maker through the fan blades of a large swamp boat. And the third ... well, he tries to rape Nadia, and he gets an appropriate punishment that will make every man in the audience cringe.

Overall, it's a film that is well worth the while of genre fans, despite the hackneyed premise and characters. The locale and the last act give it enough demented energy to stand above the pack.

DVD INFO

* widescreen anamorphic

* no info available

 

 

 

 

 

THE CRITICS AND ACADEMIES

No major reviews online

THE PEOPLE

   
6.8 IMDB summary (of 10)
  (Statistically meaningless)

THE BOX OFFICE

Unknown

NUDITY REPORT

  • Nadia Fares showed her bum in a scene where she hiked up her skirt for the yokels.

Google
 
Web www.scoopy.com

Our Grade:

If you are not familiar with our grading system, you need to read the explanation, because the grading is not linear. For example, by our definition, a C is solid and a C+ is a VERY good movie. There are very few Bs and As. Based on our descriptive system, this film is a:

C