Psycho Storm Chaser (Exit 19 Productions, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched last night’s Lifetime “premiere,” an inanity called Psycho Storm Chaser which the channel showed at the end of a sequence that included Psycho Yoga Instructor, Psycho Stripper, Psycho Escort (are you beginning to see a pattern here?) and A Predator’s Obsession (second in a series of three movies about a teenage sexual predator with a “thing” for sharks, including feeding his victims to them) before Psycho Storm Chaser, and a film called Killer Single Dad (which I notice I found unusually good in my moviemagg blog post on it, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/07/killer-single-dad-lietime-2018.html) after it. In my post on Psycho Yoga Instructor I joked that the title was probably the result of a brainstorming session among Lifetime writers asking each other the question, “What’s the silliest title we can possibly think of for a Lifetime movie?” Alas, the people who came up with Psycho Storm Chaser at least equaled, if not surpassed, the people who came up with Psycho Yoga Instructor (the writer of Psycho Storm Chaser was Jay Black and the writer of Psycho Yoga Instructor was Robert Black – were they brothers? They certainly are artistically, if not familially!).

The central character is Carl Highstrom (Rib Hillis – that’s right: not Rob, Rib!), who not only chases storms but shoots footage of them and sells it to a cable TV channel (a fictitious one whose name escapes me) from which an awful lot of people recognize him. In the opening scene he crashes into the basement of a typically dumb movie blonde woman who has decided to ignore the evacuation orders and ride out the storm that is sweeping through her area. At first she thinks she’s in luck because someone who knows about storms has come to her home and she asks him to rescue her, but soon she learns that his agenda is something quite different. He starts chewing her out for having stayed behind when authorities told everyone to evacuate, and when she protests that now is not the time to play the blame game, he whips out a screwdriver and stabs her with it. The film then cuts to its main locale, Brody Point (we’re shown a map of where it is but the map is so vague we can’t pinpoint its location beyond that it’s on the east coast of the U.S.), where we meet the other central characters: local doctor Abby Fields (Tara Erickson), her boyfriend Tony (Ali Zahiri), the local cop who’s also Abby’s ex, Jack Redford (Ivan Djurovic), and Ella Banks (Mary O’Neil). The gimmick is that Abby and Tony are live-in nurse-caregivers for Ella’s comatose sister Hannah (Clarke Wolfe), who has been unconscious since she was involved in an auto accident.

Hannah has been set up in a bed with the usual medical equipment, including those ubiquitous screens with numbers on them that are supposed to keep a running tally of her vital functions so people responsible for her care can see how she’s doing. Abby and Ella have a prickly – to say the least! – working relationship in which Ella is the hard-ass employer convinced that sooner or later Abby and Tony are going to let her down. (She’s right about Tony, at least: he’s shown as such an idiot that when he’s sent to the nearest town to buy gasoline to run the Banks family’s power generator so all the machines that are keeping Hannah alive can continue to function if the impending storm blows the power, he’s told he can pick up other essential items and he asks, “S’more’s?” Obviously when she dumped the cop for this twerp, she was moving down.) Carl invades their home and decides that they’ve been irresponsible for not having arranged for Hannah to be evacuated to a hospital out of storm range, and he’s going to punish them for their irresponsibility by killing them all. First he pulls out Hannah’s IV and leaves her to die, then he starts going after the others. He talks Tony into filming him doing a voiceover for his latest storm broadcast, then wallops him with Tony’s own baseball bat (he took it out for protection but Carl easily overpowered him and took it away from him). Then he goes into the house and stalks Abby and Ella in scenes whose director, Buz Wallick (who gets a possessory “A Film by Buz Wallick” credit at the beginning, as if he were actually proud of it), can’t make up his mind whether he wants them to be suspenseful or Gothic, so he tries for both and achieves neither.

Eventually he and Jay Black get around to explaining just why Carl is so het up about people who stay behind in storm zones instead of evacuating when the authorities tell them to: his wife lost her life in such a situation. Black’s script tells us that in the first half-hour (along with letting us know that Abby looks strikingly like Carl’s late wife, though he does surprisingly little with that information) but it’s only about half an hour before the end that he tells us the real reason the death of his wife drove Carl into psycho-dom: it seems the reason she stayed behind when the evacuation order came through was that she was having an affair with another man and they were too busy fucking to bother to evacuate. When I looked up this film on imdb.com there was a review of it by someone identified as “kdmanx,” who wrote, “This has got to be the silliest movie I have ever seen in my life. I could not bear to watch more than an hour of it. Do not waste your time.” Believe it or not, kdmanx, it just got sillier after that – of course Abby and Ella get trapped in the house by the crazed psycho storm chaser, of course they do the typical dumb horror-movie thing of trying to escape the villain by fleeing up into the house’s second-story bedroom, and eventually they’re cornered in the room where Hannah (ya remember Hannah?) is in bed, and then [spoiler alert!] Hannah suddenly comes out of her coma and wallops Carl, subduing her long enough for hunky police officer Jack Redford (who’d earlier been murderously attacked by Carl, but somehow survived) to come along and arrest him. There’s a tag scene in which Hannah and Ella are having breakfast together, they invite Abby to join them, Jack shows up and it’s clear he and Abby have reconciled, and then the scene cuts to Carl being led away in an ambulance where the woman who’s watching him is so thrilled at taking care of an actual celebrity she’s going gaga over him as he slowly loosens his bonds and … we’re left hanging at that point and wondering whether Messrs. Wallick and Black are so proud of this thing they think it’s going to do well enough to merit a sequel.

It almost certainly achieved a theatrical release somewhere in the world because, in addition to the typical plain-styled Lifetime credits at the beginning there are theatrical-style credits at the end (Lifetime cut the telecast just as those were starting to show the cast members and identify them with their roles). But it’s one of the silliest movies ever made, even by Lifetime’s standards (or lack thereof), and it doesn’t even have any sexy guys or any interesting performances. As the heroic cop whom we’ve been thinking all movie is a better partner for Abby than wimpy and dumb Tony, Ivan Djurovic is O.K. but not particularly hot; and though Lifetime usually casts its villains with sexier actors than its heroes, we don’t get to see Rib Hillis except in a yellow raincoat that doesn’t exactly show off his bod. What’s more, he’s the sort of villain character that’s more annoying than genuinely menacing; his glare-ice change of character in the opening scene with the blonde is genuinely scary but for most of the rest of the movie he just screams. As the psycho he’s far more snarling Lawrence Tierney than boyish and superficially cute Anthony Perkins, and though he racks up an impressive body count (recently Lifetime has been writing their movies so their alleged “murderers” don’t actually kill anybody – they just try to – but Jay Black wasn’t going to wimp out that way) he’s still a profoundly uninteresting villain and we’re less scared than just annoyed at the open-ended finish that seems to be setting up a sequel. (It reminds me of the Los Angeles Times reviewer who ended his article about the film Saw IV with something like, “Please don’t go to see this film. Don’t give them an excuse to make Saw V” – which, as it turned out, they did, and a Saw VI as well before they finally ran afoul of the law of diminishing returns.) Psycho Storm Chaser is every bit as dumb as you’d expect from the title – and then some; the gimmick of having the coma patient wake up and be the deus ex machina just put the icing of ludicrousness on an already silly cake.