Film: Dark Storm

A movie starring a lesser Baldwin (Stephen, they’re all ‘lesser’ to Alec since he’s been around the longest) who spends the whole film looking vaguely pissed off, or as if he’s trying to do mental arithmetic (like Joey, Matt LeBlanc, in Friends is advised to do when required to show emotion), an expression that probably originates from his manful struggle to spout scientific gobbledegook like ‘I’ve never seen so much dark matter in one place’ as if it actually meant something.

He plays that disaster movie cliché, the one sensible person in the possibly (inevitably) catastrophic scenario battling whatever constitutes the powers that be (the mayor/the government/the corporation/the other scientists), questioning their refusal to act in the face of this certain calamity, usually for reasons of the bottom line, insisting that the town/beach/world be evacuated while there’s still time (time is always of the essence) because there’s going to be a tidal wave/earthquake/tornado/shark attack/solar flare/alien invasion (delete as appropriate).

He will probably be the one to deliver possibly the most used line in any horror/thriller/scifi movie: ‘Let’s get the hell outta here!’ as if anyone would contemplate staying put while the sky falls in.

To top it all, he’s absorbed some ‘dark matter’ himself, as you do, been electrocuted then struck by lightning. No wonder he looks a little peeved.

The plot is nonsensical but the film’s a trip. See the image on the front of the box – that’s the expression Stephen Baldwin wears throughout. Perplexed. Or maybe that’s just his ‘intelligent scientist’ face.

Film: Ferocious Planet or 'Don't Poke the Alien!'

The box says it all

This film had us in fits from start to finish. I don't think it’s deliberately funny, more just a touch tongue in cheek but it’s definitely worth watching for its comedic value. Not that it’s without a serious moral message. I’ll tell you this at the end.

A group of bigshots in a lab to observe an experiment are accidentally moved through time and space by a couple of Irish scientists to the eponymous Ferocious Planet.

Strolling through the woods

The planet bears an uncanny resemblance to a wood anywhere on Earth (with a few cheap special effects such as violet smoke and flashing lights) although this doesn’t stop one of the inadvertently intrepid travellers from taking cellphone photos of trees, mushrooms and other flora which look exactly the same as their Earthly equivalent, to document the experience, while continually failing to even attempt to capture on film any of the huge dinosaur-like creatures (unsubtly realised in CGI, not quite as lifelike as Harryhausen's Dynamation) that give chase to our merry band and we assume give the planet its moniker as the place itself is no more ferocious than Central Park. As with the latter, it’s the natives that are ferocious rather than the habitat.

There is quicksand though and two of the men get stuck in it. The woman says: ‘Don’t worry. I go to Pilates six days a week.’ Who knew that this would give her enough strength to pull two heavy blokes out of quicksand? I’m having words with my yoga teacher as I still struggle to carry a medium-sized suitcase.

A straight-talking type with a deep southern drawl (at least to begin with), identified as the Colonel, takes control, (the likeable Joe Flanigan doing a passable impression of Christian Kane), and points out the obvious: ‘We’re not safe here.’ Someone asks: ‘Where do you suggest we go?’ Colonel: ‘Somewhere where our asses aren’t sticking up in the middle of the air.’

Every now and then, it falls to a character to deliver some of the Colonel’s backstory, which is entirely unnecessary but is there to prove that, although he’s someone who’s been wrongly discredited, he is really an all-round good guy. The dialogue is horribly ‘on the nose’, so: ‘It wasn’t your fault that hospital was destroyed.’

Here’s an absolutely priceless comment from the female Irish scientist or voice of doom: ‘According to my calculations, we only have six hours before the aligned conjunction of this dimension with ours suffers quantum collapse. … Once the dimensions fall out of alignment, we’re stuck here forever.’

However, whenever the Colonel asks how long they have, which he does periodically, neither of the scientists is able to give him any idea, saying things like ‘Two hours? Three hours?’ or ‘Not long now’. They’re rather vague. I wouldn’t trust scientists that can't even read a wristwatch myself.

Ferocious? Moi?

Anyway, time is supposedly of the essence but the characters still take what can only be described as a desultory stroll through the woods as if they really were wandering in Central Park on an extra long lunch break. My sister comments ‘I’ve seen people move faster than this in Morrisons.’ If you’ve ever been in Morrisons, you’ll know that its shoppers are like zombies; they move at a snail’s pace.

Possibly the most hilarious sequence is when the two scientists communicate by scribbling hieroglyphics on a pad, after each scribble, saying stuff like: ‘Could it be?’ (more frantic writing such as 223-4(x) + å17³²) then ‘But’ (a few quick pencil scratches) or ‘What if’ (more frenetic scrawling) then ‘It’s theoretically impossible!’ and so on. This episode stands in for the need for any real scientific explanation of how they got in their current predicament and how they’re going to get out of it. Neat.

Some sample dialogue
Hapless Expendable No. 1 pokes the alien they’ve captured, which seems to be dead. This results in the death of Hapless Expendable No. 1.
Scientist: What the hell happened?
Hapless Expendable No. 2: He poked it with a pen and some black stuff shot out and hit him in the face.
Scientist (reprovingly): Don’t poke the alien. (This has to be one of the best lines in a sci-fi movie ever and surely a creed we need to adopt for life but it’s still not the moral of the tale.)

Am I starting to sound Irish to you?

Meanwhile, the Irish accent has proved contagious and has spread from the scientists to the rest of the cast. Even the Colonel is speaking with a slight Irish brogue.

So, the moral of this tale would be ‘Do not allow Irish people who can't tell the time to fiddle with the space-time continuum’ especially one who boasts ‘I’m one of the most intelligent people in the world.’