Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

It’s late at night and I’m thinking I should watch me a movie before I turn in and I want to watch something light, maybe a comedy. So I have this disk from our friends at Cinetel, ‘Ba’al the Storm God’ and the last two movies I’d seen from them were ‘Hydra’ and ‘The Bone Eater’ with the latter featuring Bruce Boxleitner playing a Native American. Now that’s funny. Both movies were pretty funny to be honest with you so despite the fact I know the ‘Ba’al The Storm God’ is designed to be a creature feature horror type flick, I’m banking on it being pretty funny, especially considering it started out in life as a Sci-FI Original which almost always screams comedy. And thus I slipped in the disk and was hoping it would fill me with warm happy thoughts as I bid the day adieu, but my friends, ‘Ba’al The Storm God’ was not funny. It was not scary. It was not interesting and it was not even slightly entertaining. It was dull and stupid. What a waste of the glorious talents of the Countess Stefanie Von Pfetten.

The flick opens with one of the least exciting heists in recent memory as a couple of thugs being controlled by some unseen dude are breaking into a museum to steal some documents. This museum obviously has some important stuff in here because the rent-a-cops in this joint are armed to the teeth. What’s up with that? Regardless the documents are stolen and a Black security guard gets crushed by an amazingly unstable 5 ton statue in the process. Dead Black Dude out of the way with a quickness.

Now we meet our principles in this film in uptight archeologist Dr. Lee Helm (Jeremy London) and his colleague language expert Dr. Carol Gage (Ms. Von Pfetten). They are at some dig in the Arctic Circle being run by sickly Archeologist Owen Stanford (Scott Hylands) who apparently has cancer but has an inhaler he constantly uses which I can only assume is chemo in a pump. Stanford, who is grossly misappropriating the

museums funds that he and Helm work for, has made the find of the century, one of the hidden medallions of Ba’al, the mythical God of Meteorology! Once Stanford unearths this gem all hell breaks loose, stuff explodes, people die and an evil face appears in the clouds but its all good because off our trio goes to track down the other three amulets. Earth, Wind and Fire baby. Or something.

The bad byproduct of unearthing this medallion and the subsequent medallions is that Earth’s weather has gone completely bonkers. This takes us to pretty meteorologist PhD. Dr. Pena (Lexa Doig) who is working with the U.S. Navy weather Commander Kitrick (Michael Copsa) and his underling Lt. Scott (Elias Toufexis). I gotta tell you, Lt. Scott was wearing navy lieutenant bars on his collar and Corporal stripes on his sleeve. Of course I could be wrong. Anyway the Navy weather service is quickly realizing that these storms are out of control and with each unraveling of a medallion it’s only getting worse and the survival of the planet of earth is in danger. Dr. Stanford is actually trying to resurrect the evil god Ba’al for some wacky reason and he’s about to succeed unless somehow our scientist can figure out how to stop them, that is in conjunction with our pretty meteorologist who believes the best course of action is drop a nuclear weapon on the evil clouds. I kid you not.

The first fifty minutes of this movie consists of people talking about stuff. Now the only way you’re going to have any chance of finding any of this stuff interesting is if by chance you happen to be deep into meteorology and archeology. But because of the abject laziness I’ve seen in this movie I’m guessing if you do happen to be into meteorology or archeology our characters endless chatter will only insult you since I figure somebody probably got on the Wikipedia, grabbed a bunch of fancy sounding terms and stitched them together to make a script. "Dude, if we don’t disrupt the Van Allen radiation belts and sever the electrical arcs which are linked to the counter rotational axis lines of the earths core gyrational compass pull… the resulting havoc will lead to devastation!" And so on and so forth.

The movie jumps between the weather control room in which we watch people talking fancy and looking super concerned at computer monitors, and hats off to actor Elias Toufexis who can look as serious as any actor ever, and then back out to the field where our archeologist talk fancy and look super serious at dirt and rocks. Things pick up a bit when the storms kick in a little in the third act, though our control room people are still looking super serious at computer monitors, but fancy talk is now replaced by stupid stuff. There’s a frame up going on in our story but you gotta wonder why a guy who plans to destroy the earth would frame some other guy in the process. Then considering the proof of this frame up is that my man’s fingerprints are all over the place at the museum, but damn, it’s his freaking museum so shouldn’t his fingerprints be all over the place anyway?

The problem with this movie is director Paul Ziller plays this thing deadly straight. This movie is completely humorless. Our character quickly accept an evil cloud with red glowing eyes as fact and now it’s time to talk, and talk, and talk, and talk about how to make it go away. One would think nuking a cloud would be funny, but one would be wrong as they take that as serious as a heart attack as well. And since there wasn’t enough drama or tension to make all this serious talk even remotely interesting all that we are left with is ninety minutes of pure unadulterated tedium. Who knew that nuking the Van Allen radiation belts to crush the electrical arc axis could be so boring?