Director: Uwe Boll

Cast: Steve Bacic, Lauren Holly, Luke Perry

Synopsis: Struggling farmer Tom and his wife Gillian are visited by a mysterious stranger in the midst of a thunderstorm, after which they discover nearly all of their neighbours have disappeared.

Watching The Final Storm it’s impossible to escape the impression that producer and director Uwe Boll was trying to combine two separate stories that stubbornly refuse to fit together. On the one hand we have this strange and intriguing tale of freak weather conditions presaging the end of the world, and on the other we have an altogether more prosaic tale of domestic strife. It’s true that the latter is largely brought on by the former, but even so, it’s difficult to find any reason for the two strands to be joined together in the way that they have.

Steve Bacic (The 6th Day) plays Tom Grady a farmer whose entire crop is wiped out by a torrential rain that has fallen for weeks. The stress is driving him to resume the destructive drinking habit he forsook when moving to the farm in an attempt to patch up his marriage to Gillian (Lauren Holly – Spirited Away), and the situation isn’t helped with the arrival of a mysterious stranger named Silas (Luke Perry) in the middle of a fierce storm. Even worse, shortly after Silas’s arrival, the Gradys discover that their neighbours and most of the residents of the nearby town have vanished, leaving behind only a gang of less than friendly men.

I think the idea is that the arrival of Silas coinciding with the apocalyptic change in the weather and sudden disappearance of almost everyone is supposed to have us thinking the stranger is either God or one of his messengers. The fact that he isn’t is paradoxically both a strength – because screenwriter Tim McGregor doesn’t travel down the obvious path – and a weakness because the revelation of Silas’s identity is a badly handled anti-climax that has the film briefly straying into stalk and slash territory. The film’s other reveal regarding the strange weather and disappearances requires that Tom behave like a tool towards his wife and teenage son (Cole Heppell) if he is to suffer a fate that ties in with the film’s climax. Unfortunately, that doesn’t explain why Gillian and her son are still around to share that fate. Confused? You will be…

(Reviewed 15th November 2014)