Stormhouse

I cannot find any better word to describe this movie. For a low budget movie, they have done a great job. I am afraid I cannot agree with the negative reviews. To me the dark environment, the harmony between the audio and light effects was almost perfect. Unique story along with the great play makes it more interesting. I have watched this movie several times and I will keep on watching it at times when I really need a chilling movie to indulge in to. I am very sorry that this movie and all its crew have not been well appreciated as they truly deserve much better recognition. I just have one question and I still cannot figure that out is the connection between this event and the invasion of Iraq. As far as I could think, such event could happen at any time in the history. What was so specific about this movie and its link to the invasion? I could not see the connection or I might have missed something. Other than that, it was greatly done.

Sadly, the comments I read before watching the movie got me pretty excited, I wasn't expecting a masterpiece but certainly not this, not this at all. A complete waste of time, from minute 1 till its very end.

The most annoying thing during "Stormhouse", is the light! There isn't any! It's all pretty much pitch black, you can hardly ever see anything! Of course the acting is as bad as it gets, the dialogue as horrible as possible, even the sound was extremely bad! Why? Because it fluctuated in a very disturbing way, either the actors were whispering and you couldn't hear one word they were saying or out of the blue you got hit by this amazingly loud "music", put there to mark a very "important and suspenseful" moment! And there were none, so the "music" was clearly set only to annoy the audience. It looks like one of them really old movies, where everything happens in the dark, and you have to use you imagination, as wildly as possible, to make sense of anything whatsoever.

If you don't take my advice and you decide to give it a try, because 4 other people gave positive feedback, after you see it, I double dare you to find something worse out there! And believe me, this is going to be one heck of a challenge!

I sat through this biting my lip, not through tension, but from just sheer embarrassment. The acting was reasonable, but the lighting was disastrous, it looked cheap on every level.

The only good thing about a film like this is the actors can hide their faces and simply pick up their paycheck after they've finished with performing this rubbish. For a film of this 'quality' you obviously hire a cheap writer, who fortunately for them will always be able to remain anonymous, especially as they are irrelevant to the structure of the piece.

Whoever wrote this should go away for a long time and read a bit of Syd Field and learn the craft before ever putting pen to paper again. No need to go into story here, as it's been covered previously.

It saddens and angers me that with so much talent out there, a group of individuals can come together and gain funding for this kind of atrocity. No wonder the British Film industry struggles if this is the best it can come up with. I wasted a few hours, I suppose I should not grumble, at least I had the time to waste and can use this as a demonstration on how not to write a screenplay and tell a story.

Harsh I know, but this is a warning to others. Avoid Stormhouse like the plague, although the plague is a better option.

Brought on-board a secret military base, a woman's attempts to investigate their supposed capture of a supernatural entity causes chaos on the base when it's accidentally released and goes on the rampage, forcing her to try to stop it.

This turned out to be quite a dreadful and really uninteresting effort without a lot really going for it. One of the only positives to this is the frankly original plot line concerning the capture of such an entity and what means is being done to control and contain it. Being able to remain controlled in a small enclosure with electronic impulses makes for a rather unique touch and allows this a pretty original touch that doesn't really get used all that often yet here makes some sense as the military would be one of the few places in the world where access to such material isn't out of the ordinary and seems pretty plausible throughout here. As well, the final half here tends to focus on the body-hopping means that the ghost employs to seek out revenge on the base for it's imprisonment and that leads to some mildly-tense sequences where it's in someone unexpectedly causing them to engage in all the horrific ideas and acts quite nicely. However, there's a lot really wrong here with the fact that this one tends to use a pretty hackneyed and cliché motive of the powers-that-be being unwilling to provide much in the way of explanations that would help this one be a little more understandable. Considering this is par for the course from the military, that's not all that out of the realms of realism where disinformation and withholding is pretty much par for the course in their history but here it just leads to endless scenes of her trying to actually do her job that she was specifically called there for yet keeps coming up with the bull-headed and refusal tactics from the military brass there which really begs the question of why she would want to stay there when what she's seen and been exposed to from their attitudes toward her would seem to really question why it was included in the first place. As well, this tends to really affect the pace of this with numerous scenes that go nowhere due to their refusal as well as tends to cause this to feel like a drag with hardly anything happening which is quite a common trait in many of the recent British efforts so this is no exception. Finally, the low-budget on display throughout this tends to cause the attacks to come off as quite lame and really ridiculous with hardly any real effort put into them, the special effects aren't that great and overall the film's centerpiece scenes are pushed so far into the back-half of the film it's too little too late as well as being plagued by ineffectiveness. These hold this back and really harm it overall.

Rated R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.

Story/Writing: It's a pretty solid claustrophobic story. It's interesting and generally well-written, with only a few "What the heck?" moments. The dialogue is generally good, though the minor characters are fairly stock, interchangeable, and pretty forgettable. One or two of them almost come through sometimes as interesting in their own right, but then the moments are gone. Still, it all works pretty well, and the pace was okay, which is better than most films. And I believe the ending worked. I liked it. (7/10)

Direction/Acting: It's atmospheric, to be sure, just sometimes a bit too dark to see what's going on on-screen. Considering the budget and likely time constraints they were under, I can understand why they made the choices they did. Still, however, a bit too dark too often. The pace was generally good, with only a few short lulls (and they weren't distracting). (6.5/10)

The acting was pretty good across the board, though it seemed the supporting cast's characters were limited by either the script or the director's choices on pacing and story... or possibly both. It was obvious the talent was there, and more from the supporting cast really could've livened things up for tension, in my opinion. It could've given it that feel they were looking for, the atmosphere from John Carpenter's "The Thing". Stormhouse's ensemble cast were good, the main cast in particular. I kept wanting more, though, and that's the biggest drawback for my money. (5/10)