I took a chance on this oddity, because I kind of enjoyed another minor-budget film by the same director/writer David Winning. Or maybe it was the presence of Michael Ironside in that film? Anyway, the Cannon produced Canadian endurance thriller "STORM" plays its cards in a typical fashion. Well, up to a point. Thanks to some rather offbeat and uncanny sequences.
After the nicely shot, laconically dark opening scene. It gets a little slow and stretched out by settling on featherbrain comedy of its two leads (namely David Palfy's meekly nerdish character) turning their campus into a battleground with their assassination game played with dart guns. Along with jarring dream sequences. This goes on for nearly a good hour, before they decide to take this sense of gung-ho survival to the wilderness. Then these two camping buddies come across three crooks returning after nearly four decades to retrieve their stolen loot. And the two soon realize survival out there, is not just going to be some game.
You might scoff at some dweeb character taking on crooks in the backwoods, but these men are probably in their late 50s/ early 60s and not particularly healthy. So I can believe it. Even then, it can drag at times with its contrived survival mode, but it's more so psychological based rather than exploitatively action-fuelled. Winning's compact handling stays minimal with a script that seems to spend more time developing the psyches of the characters. Those moments do come into play when it becomes a life-or-death conflict, but I really dug its sense of irony with the final shot. Winning's short film "SEQUENCE" was the prototype for this feature length film.
