“To catch a mad dog, you have to think like a mad dog…Only madder…”
Jamie Blanks, a self-professed horror fan, found modest success in Hollywood with a pair of streamlined, post-SCREAM teen horror movies (URBAN LEGEND, VALENTINE), both heavily influenced by the original 80’s cycle of stalk n slash flicks. He returns to his native Australia for this Antipodean take on the post-DELIVERANCE backwoods paranoia sub-genre.
Screenwriter Everett De Roche has long been a prominent figure in the Oz horror scene, with a fondness for trapping a small number of characters in an unfamiliar, hostile environment (ROAD GAMES, LONG WEEKEND). Though STORM WARNING isn’t a patch on De Roche’s best work and suffers from an indifferent opening stretch, once it gets going, it proves significantly more ballsy and intense than Blanks’ comparatively mild American genre films.
Barrister Robert Taylor and pretty French girlfriend Nadia Fares (currently seen in American theatres in WAR) wind up stranded during a bad storm while enjoying a weekend boating trip. They take refuge at an apparently abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. The remote, shabby building is home to a vast marijuana crop and a pair of demented, bestiality-loving hicks (played with crazed relish by David Lyons and Matthew Wilkinson) and their equally deranged dad (John Brumpton), the kind of guy whose porno collection features as many horses as girls. Fares is tied up, tormented and relentlessly threatened while Taylor looks on, but both refuse to fall victim to these backwoods degenerates and the fight-back begins.
Blanks, who also co-edited and composed the score, has made a notably nasty addition to a crowded sub-genre. STORM WARNING doesn’t bring anything wildly fresh or surprising to its familiar premise, and we never really sympathize with our one-note protagonists despite the best efforts of two capable leading actors.
With the introduction of yet another fucked up horror family, however, the movie begins to ratchet up the tension and crafts genuinely unnerving scenes of the imperiled city couple being abused and tormented by the repellent trio. The flick really pays off in the second half when Blanks makes the most of the sadistic excesses inherent in De Roche’s screenplay, and the story turns in to a gleefully over the top survivalist splatter movie. Hard to watch moments involved multiple fish-hooks to the face and Fares’ self-made vaginal-secreted castration device (every woman should have one…in fact, several of the women I have dated did have at least one). Both unpleasant gore highlights, however, are topped by a superlative climactic bad guy demise that you’ll have to see to appreciate
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
