Ghost Storm

Here we are on the most Dangerous Night on Television, that being Saturday night on the Sci-Fi Channel, primed to watch a Sci-Fi Channel original feature film, which means that Paul Ziller, the director of this film 'Ghost Storm' is clearly the most Dangerous Director on Television since he sits behind the camera on every other Sci-Fi channel original. Admittedly in the past when these two Dangerous Titans of TV Entertainment have united the only real thing in danger has been our sanity, but past performance is never an indicator of future earnings here at the FCU, and we hold out hope for 'Ghost Storm'. Thus after watching 'Ghost Storm' we probably still have to come to the conclusion that it is kind of terrible, but damn if it didn't have its moments.

M.E. Mr. Principle as played by FCU favorite David Lewis. While we don't know much at this point about 'Ghost Storm', we do know that David Lewis will die in it. Believe that. Also monitoring this situation, because somehow the smoke is a weather event in some way, is Sheriff Miller's meteorologically enhanced ex-wife Ashley (Crystal Allen) who knows trouble when she sees it in the form of a red spot on her monitor.

Soon a couple more people die by evil smoke, and don't be too surprised if one of those people is actor David Lewis, and now everybody knows that there is evil smoke in Island Town USA. So in a situation where evil spirit smoke is hovering above your town, what do you do? Uh… die. That's what you do, and this evil smoke will be taking care of its business. I mean it's killing freaking everybody for what looks like no reason at all. There is a Paranormal Investigator in the form of one Greg Goropolis (Aaron Douglas) who might be able to help, but all he did was make the evil smoke eviler and smokier. Fortunately The Authorita sends help via the local ferry, but Evil Smoke really hates ferry's so Island Town is on their own.

What's the deal? Daisy the spunky teen has figured it had something to do with her homicidal great grandfather who keeps f'n with her by popping up on her Iphone, but the real issue is what does this evil smoke want? I don't want to spoil it for you, but its pretty much getting what it wants, that being watching suspect actors explode. Now the question is 'How do we stop it?'. Well, they are gonna stop it, of course, but that wouldn't be one of those good moments I was talking about.

Just the other day, after watching some Sci-Fi Channel weather oriented original film, I was whining on and on about how weather as a bad guy just doesn't work all that well, unless the weather is crazy evil in some kind of way. Well here you go! Crazy ass evil weather phenomena! True enough it probably didn't work out quite as well as I would've hoped, but I will say that evil ghost infused weather phenomena is a better foil than just some random cloud causing destruction.

So what's good about 'Ghost Storm'? Death and destruction. I mean the ghost storm was completely off the chain in sucking souls and exploding people. There didn't seem to be any real reason as to why the evil smoke was doing this, outside of the fact that evil smoke was a dick, but the fact that you couldn't go a good two minutes without watching somebody explode was a good thing and helped keep things humming along.

Now as far as the narrative goes, this is where the problems lie with 'Ghost Storm' in that your guess was as good as mine as to what exactly was going on in this film at any given moment. It had something to do with evil priests, I think… maybe some cults, an alter boy maybe. How all of this manifested itself into evil smoke is never really made clear and Lord only knows how they dreamed up the solution to this problem is one of the more remarkably confusing things in this movie, but we rolled with it, comfortable in the knowledge that duct tape can fix just about any bad situation. Also, it's good how the U.S. government completely abandoned Island Town since one would think exploding ferry boats filled with U.S. Government officials would generate some kind of governmental response, but clearly our government, or more accurately the Canadian Government chose to let Island Town die. And I'm pretty sure Island Town is dead except for three people.

Regardless of all of that, we did not hate 'Ghost Storm' here at the FCU while working within the shortcomings we've come to expect and the added bonus of massive amounts of exploding humans. Not so bad.