One from the DVD bargain bin, this low-budget horror thriller rarely manages to be particularly scary or interesting. It delivers its evil military science hokum with a straight face and complete lack of enthusiasm.
Psychic Hayley Sands (Katie Flynn) is admitted to a secret under lit underground research facility called Stormhouse to investigate (or communicate or something) with a supernatural entity that they have captured and confined in a “reverse electromagnetic field” which is some bizarre magic type of radiation that can imprison spirits because they are made of radiation apparently. She has been sent by a British government minister to report to him about the viability of the project.
The base is run by the gruff paranoid Major Lester (Grant Masters) and he has Lieutenant Groves (Grahame Fox) and small group of soldiers who mostly growl and leer at Hayley when they are not making homophobic taunts at one of their colleagues. The film doesn’t try to humanize these characters at all so you can tell what their fate is.
In the control room are a couple of technicians; a scruffy hippy type Justin Rourke (Patrick Flynn) who looks after Hayley and is about the closest to a male lead in this film and the more straight-laced Brandon Faber (Martin Delaney) who hardly seems to ever leave the control room. They are monitoring the imprisoned entity and controlling the reverse EM field which is a wire fence with a spotlight lighting the centre. The entity is mostly invisible but it does manifest for a cheap jump scare on a recording that they. They let her into the room with the entity so she can sort of sense it and it kind of reacts to her.
Hayley wonders why they are doing this and later she sees them bring in a prisoner with a bag over his head and they toss him into the enclosure where this supernatural super weapon beats him up a bit, damages an eye and makes him dance like a puppet while it makes the soldiers clap out a rhythm. Lester justifies this by saying that the prisoner Salim Hassan (Munir Khairdin) is a terrorist guilty of several atrocities. So this film has chosen to comment on the very real subject of human right abuses of prisoners by authorities. This is in addition the narrow-minded stupidity of the fact that they have evidence that spirits exist and have imprisoned one and all they are doing is using it to torture and kill people. Naturally at some point the entity escapes and it kills nearly everyone by possessing people and making them kill the others in the dark until we’re just left with Hayley escaping Stormhouse.
You can probably guess that I think this film is pretty stupid. It is done on a very low-budget and it shows. Nearly every scene is shot in poor quality ambient light. The characters are all plot devices with whatever characteristic the story calls for at any point in the film. The old cliché of the evil secret military project to create insane weapons is not helped by tacking on the heavy-handed sub-plot of the abuse of the terrorist prisoner. I’d say this film is not really worth seeing
Rating 3/10
Related Sites
Nameless Horror 
One response to “Review: Stormhouse”