MY CALL: 60 minutes of utter boredom followed by 30 minutes of sick, mean, perverse, brutal, and downright cruel horror. If this is for you, you know who you are. MORE MOVIES LIKE Storm Warning: A couple similar-ish movies include You’re Next (2013) and Lowlifes (2024).
Okay. Full disclosure. This is another one of those movies that I pretty much never heard of until I saw some brutal gory screen grabs someone shared on social media. Yes, I indeed often watch movies based on that alone, ignoring all reviews. Sometimes they’re delightful (e.g., The Hills Run Red), and sometimes they’re not (e.g., Hellhole, Inbred). Storm Warning falls somewhere in the middle ground.
Pia (Nadia Farès) and Rob (Robert Taylor; The Meg, Blood Vessel) depart on a fishing-boating outing for the day and get lost during low tide on their way back. Stranded in the wilderness, they manage to avoid some unsavory types on the road and wander upon a farmhouse by nightfall. Now who guessed that’s where the unsavory folks lived…?
The writing and acting are pretty stale, almost like an early 90s episode of Baywatch, meeting the people who would get rescued later. This is like a soap opera with the odd episode out on the water, so the outdoor and water sets are of the lowest quality the production assistants could find to save money.
Like the Ides of Wrong Turn (2003), they hike past long-abandoned cars overgrown in weeds. When they reach the disheveled house, it seems no one is home. So, of course, they go in nose around to find an absolute pigsty decorated with blow up dolls, nudie magazine centerfolds, and a marijuana grow-house operation. Before they can decide to leave and take their chances in the bush, the residents arrive home and are none too happy with their uninvited guests.
The couple becomes acquainted at gunpoint by the brothers who live there, out far from any main road or town or shop. And with a storm upon them, they agree to stay the night before being driven to civilization the next day. They really don’t want to stay. But they hardly have any choice. Predictably, things go from awkwardly hospitable, to manipulative, to threats and forced captivity… and then we wander into the zone of inevitable sexual assault.
This movie takes a long time to get to the point. Nothing remotely interesting happens for at least an hour. And while that’s not so unusual for the genre, the first our is such a slog that it feels like punishment. I’m hoping director Jamie Blanks (Urban Legend, Valentine) just did this for the paycheck.
Desperate to escape, Pia sets some clever traps for her captors. There is a bruuuutal “Jesus wept” Hellraiser (1987) trap that hooks and yanks chunks of flesh with incredibly visceral imagery; some grade-A gory head hammering and wound work; a mean but deserved vagina dentata gore gag; a wild scene with a dog ending in disembowelment; and a giant propeller death. These visuals are pretty great, so now we see where every dollar of the budget went. Not rewrites, not sets, not higher caliber actors… just the gooey, chunky, lacerated skin flappy gore.
So was it worth it? Well, I won’t lie. The first hour was really rough. But the last 30 minutes had a lot of gore and violence and perverted hillbilly mania to offer. So if you enjoy sick, mean, brutal, and downright cruel horror, then this is probably for you.
