Storm Warning

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Storm Warning

June 19th 2008 00:59

Melbourne director Jamie Blanks was the Aussie boy done good when he was catapulted into the American horror limelight with his debut feature Urban Legend (1998). But unfortunately the movie was no good, and neither was his follow up Valentine (2001). So, I when I saw he was behind this release from Dimension Films' straight-to-DVD Extreme division I wasn’t too surprised. I wasn't expecting great things, despite finding the cover image striking. Of course, the back cover also stated that the movie featured "some of the most intensely brutal scenes imaginable." Yeah, right, pull the other one, it’s got bloody bells on it.

Storm Warning (2006) is an Aussie production, was completed a couple of years ago, and has spent the last year doing the International festival circuit (but not down under!) Apparently, according to the DVD front cover, it won a Best Special Effects award at the L.A. Screamfest last year. My interest was piqued a little more.

Storm Warning Robert Taylor and Nadia Fares

Rob (Robert Taylor) and Pia (Nadia Fares), lost and a little frightened

A yuppie couple, Rob (Robert Taylor) and his French wife Pia (Nadia Farès) are holidaying out of Melbourne and go on a leisurely fishing trip on a small boat. After one catch and spilling most of their champagne when Rob tries killing the fish with the base of the bottle Nadia’s had enough, but Rob makes the decision to take the boat around the heads and traveling inland up a swampy backwater canal. Pretty soon the boat can go no further, so it’s on foot for these intrepid wetsuit-clad adventurers.

Storm Warning Mathew Wilkinson and David Lyon

Simple Brett (Mathew Wilkinson) and volatile Jimmy (David Lyon) are the vile sons from Hell

There’s thick forest all around and a heavy storm is bearing down on them. After witnessing a man being beaten by the side of a narrow dirt road, they seek immediate refuge. Wahey! A farmhouse! It’s decrepit and looks rather ominous, but they enter after discovering the door to be unlocked. The place is a pigsty with porn and sex toys lying amongst the filth and squalor. Rob searches for a phone, but finds a shed full of cultivated marijuana plants (art dept.’s never seem to get it looking like the real deal).

Just when the couple realise they should probably skedaddle the residents arrive in their Ford pickup. There’s an ugly meeting between the couple and redneck sons Jimmy (David Lyons) and Brett (Mathew Wilkinson), who are armed and more than likely pretty dangerous. Rob and Pia are ushered indoors by harpoon-toting Jimmy while younger misfit Brett takes heavily inebriated Poppy (John Brumpton) upstairs for a bit of a lie down.

Storm Warning David Lyon and Robert Taylor

Rednecks are never without their trusty hunting knife

What unfolds is all rather unpleasant, but wholly unoriginal. Murderous, sexually deviant father and sons harass and terrorise, then enslave the couple in the barn with the explicit intention of giving them a right savage rogering. Turns out the two different mothers of the sons were butchered by Poppy, and now whomever strays there way is fair bloody game.

The screenplay was penned by Everett De Roche (who wrote the curious Russell Mulcahy 1984 horror Razorback), apparently thirty years ago. Just how intense the original script was I’m not sure, but according to the commentary his wife suggested the particularly horrendous injury to Poppy later in the movie.

Angry Jimmy wants some action

The screenplay is littered with influences; depraved family knows best from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The People Under the Stairs (1991), backwoods perversion and kill trophy from Wrong Turn (2003), trapped, violated and retaliation from Straw Dogs (1971), absurdly inventive deaths from any number of slasher flicks, there’s even a Rob Zombie Ijustwannaberealnasty suggestion (Poppy and Brett, with one arm between daddy’s legs and another rubbing his crotch, watching a porn movie showing a woman soaping down a horse … later still, after Brett’s been instructed to rape Rob, the sounds of horse and human are all too audible!)

Mad Poppy (John Brumpton) wants his share too

Storm Warning falls into many we’ve been here before traps, but manages – and this was pleasantly surprising – to impress on a few levels. Firstly, the movie is well shot, with good camerawork and suitably dark-hued cinematography. Secondly the production design (the whole farmhouse was a soundstage-set with mostly CGI rain) is good’n’grimy with shadows hiding all manner of nastiness.

But two elements of the production stand out the most; one is director Jamie Blanks’ atmospheric music, a pulsing, chattering, throbbing electronic score which pushes the movie along in a modern fashion. The other is the movie’s special effects make-up. There are only three scenes of gore, but they’re worth the price of renting; a Hellraiser-esque “Jesus wept!” sequence guaranteed to make you squirm, a hungry Rottweiler tucking in and getting messy, and a swamprider propeller being put to good use.

Soaked and degraded, pretty Pia decides enough is enough

But there are still numerous things that bugged me; the DVD cover shows a still pic and weapon that doesn't appear in the movie, the performances of Taylor and Farès didn’t cut the mustard, the rednecks were too well-spoken to convince me of their culture-stunted living, they had a television, but no phone, and, most infuriating of the lot, was the couple’s stupidity in not getting the fuck out of Dodge on any number of opportunities presented to them. Then when they’re trapped in a barn full of tools, they don’t think to try to use any of them as basic weapons; instead Pia goes to inordinate length to install a Saw-like trap using her MacGyver skills (we learn she’s an artist, so assume that’s where her talent for such devices lies) … and Farès is only forced to bare her ass (there’s no way the redneck killer rapists would’ve let her remain fully clothed, just as Eliza Dushku’s character in Wrong Turn remains fully clothed when she’s strapped to the inbred’s table).

Storm Warning Nadia Fares and John Brumpton

Pia has a lusty surprise for nasty Poppy

Storm Warning is frustrating and stupid, but the gore factor and the atmosphere level are well-above average for a movie of this kind of simplicity and limitations. Certainly the best thing Jamie Blanks has made … and it has one of the more memorably disgusting lines spat out by a cinema villian; “I smell the cunt of a bitch gonna die!” Ahem.