Stormswept

This movie doesn't know if it wants to be a psycho slasher thing, or a ghost story, or a soft core party, and ends up being none of them.

The only reason to see this picture is if you must see every frame of Lorissa McComas ever released. (Which would be understandable...) But if you were just looking for Lorissa, see _Lapdancing_, where she has a character you can care about, and more and better screen time.

This movie falls into the dubious Genre of, What the hell did I just watch? I use the term movie generously as a movie is equal parts cinematography and story. Stormswept is seriously lacking in the latter. It builds itself up as low budget horror/soft-core porn. Unfortunately, it only get's the low budget right. The story is laughably absent and plays like the filler between porno scenes. Only those are written better. And just when the movie finally looks like it's getting it's act together and get's moving on a story, It not only fails to deliver but gives us an ending that makes so sense whatsoever. I seriously couldn't spoil this movie even if I wanted to. Because the ending makes no sense at all.

In the end, there is no reason to watch this. One could argue Boobies, But with the internet today, one can NOT be that hard up for what brief bits of nudity that exist in this horrid purgatory of a movie. If you want decent soft-core with a spoonful of plot and a dash of Satanism, Watch Damien's Seed.

Update: Upon second viewing (about 30 years later). I find myself lamenting what was good about this movie. There is actually the kernel of several good ideas here. The idea of being trapped in a haunted house, with a randy ghost, has been done before, but then someone going crazy and killing everyone during an orgy is a swerve that could give a lot of weight to an otherwise standard softcore porn fluff. Sadly, this fails even at softcore porn given our first sex scene doesn't happen until the 55 minute mark. In two hours we only get three sex scenes total.

Ultimately, While we do find out who the killer is, they are horribly underdeveloped. And I struggled to remember who they were. Honestly even the top billed actress really served no purpose and could have been left out entirely. Again the premise was interesting but it goes nowhere.

So in the end, No it was not a joke. Someone clearly cared about this movie, but lacked the skills to make it.

"Stormswept" is bad in every way: technically inept (witness the many continuity errors regarding costuming, the frequent intrusion of the boom mike into frame or the overall poor image quality), clumsily written and spottily acted. Though sold as a paranormal thriller, it is mostly an actor's workshop; the characters are stranded in a big old Louisiana plantation house while a storm rages outside. There are numerous boobs on display, male-female sex, female-female sex and lots of talking about sex, all presented in the least visually interesting fashion imaginable. Regarding its horror elements: "Stormswept" is a surprisingly bloodless film. At least a little gratuitous killing would have livened up the proceedings; when this dud reaches its rushed ending, one is tempted to scratch one's head with a dumbfounded expression and ask oneself the question, "Did I really just waste and hour and a half of my life on that?" AVOID this time-waster no matter what; you'd be better off smacking your head with a hammer and watching the stars and planets orbit for 90 minutes.

This movie would have to get better to be bad. Do not be fooled by the plot summary on back of the box. It is a poorly shot badly acted story about people you do not care about. It is not so bad as to be campy fun. Just say no.

This seems to have been an attempt to make a mainstream "psychological" horror film with a bunch of great looking actors that can't act very well, despite a long list of "B" movie credits on many of the cast's parts. This meant mostly a lot of dead air until the extremely brief nudity and violence scenes.

My guess is that they paid so much for the cast that they could not afford a director, although it is very well photographed.

Formula: "B" movie - nudity - violence - acting = very long boring trailer.