Into the Storm [Blu-ray]

Steven Quale

BY Robert BellPublished Nov 18, 2014

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It's unlikely that Into the Storm had a completed script when it went into production. In a loose sense, it took the premise of Twister and injected the grossest, most contrived and obnoxious elements from the crappiest of crappy Roland Emmerich disaster movies, and it did this unapologetically. In fact, Into the Storm almost seems proud of being an absolutely abysmal piece of shit.

With the Final Destination movies on hiatus, Final Destination 5 director Steven Quale took the helm here, basically filming a protracted disaster sequence without all the pesky plotting and creative death scenes associated with the teen horror franchise.

Here, there are two basic storylines framing the exceedingly unlikely events that find flaming tornadoes targeting and terrorizing an overly quaint American small town. The first storyline is basically Twister. Allison (Sarah Wayne Callies) is a storm chaser that sacrifices family for career. She has a kid at home but chooses to ignore it in favour of sitting in a pseudo-tank with fame-whore Pete (Matt Walsh). Needless to say, while fighting for her life, Allison learns some very valuable, very heteronormative and traditionalist lessons about the proper role of women. The second storyline involves a dorky teen (Max Deacon) making a video time capsule (yeah, the style is often that of "found footage") while trying to bang a girl that's seemingly way out of his league (Alycia Debnam Carey). Needless to say, they find themselves in some sticky situations (not those kind) that bring them together. It's awful.

Amidst this tedious white noise and the sort of clumsy acting associated with such broadly clichéd characters is an abundance of destruction with occasionally passable CGI. In fact, the Blu-ray supplements pretty much eschew talking about the "plot" (save Sarah Wayne Callies, who claims she was attracted to the "story") in favour of discussing how they created the visual effects and set up the stunts. It's clear that any passion that went into this film came from a technical perspective, which is perfectly fine; it's just a shame that no one made even the slightest effort to inject even an inkling of creativity aside from the flaming tornado.

In fact, even if they'd cut out the comic relief — which comes in the form of two rednecks trying to film dangerous Jackass-inspired stunts — this bit of throwaway fluff might have been passable nonsense for intellectually limited teens rather than the actively aggravating nonsense that it is.

(Warner Bros.)

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