he folk of Little Tall Island know how to keep a secret. They've done so in the past and they will long after "the storm of the century" passes over their land. But secrets have a price, and this time there's a difference: something has blown in with the storm. Something evil.
Old Martha Clarendon (Rita Tuckett) sits drinking her tea and fretting over the weather forecast. She isn't expecting a visitor (Feore), but when the doorbell rings she makes her way to the door with her walker. Martha can barely discern the features of the man standing in the doorway, but she can clearly see the cane with the silver wolf's head as it descends upon her.
Martha's murderer sits in her living room and finishes her tea. Then he waits to meet the townsfolk whose life he is about to change. It doesn't take long before grocery store owner and part-time constable Michael Anderson (Daly) shows up at the bloody scene and takes the mysterious man into custody. He discovers the man's name is Andre Linoge, and Linoge has a message for Michael. "Give me what I want and I'll go away."
As the storm blows in and Little Tall Island becomes cut off from the outside world, Michael realizes that something is very wrong. Linoge knows all the town's secrets, things he should have no way of knowing. And he seems to be able to control people just by looking at them. It doesn't take long before the body count begins to rise and Michael and the town must face the fact that Linoge isn't the one who is trapped, they are. And, true to his word, Linoge won't go away until he gets what he wants.
The King of miniseries
Stephen King's Storm of the Century is quintessential Stephen King. The miniseries has always been the best format for King to present his novel ideas, and Storm of the Century provides the subject matter he is so fond of: taking a normal setting and stripping away the layers until the evil is exposed. He is also one of the few authors who deserves to have his name attached to a film. Forget the director or actors. While they're fine, this is King's show.
The setting is not surprising. King starts with a normally sleepy town off the coast of Maine, where everyone knows and likes each other. Then he takes these terribly normal people and isolates them. Finally, he introduces evil (his favorite subject) and sits back while these normal people disintegrate. As with other Stephen King material, it doesn't really matter where the evil comes from. The evil knows all sins and goes about taking over some people, killing others and destroying everything in its path.
The production values of this miniseries are high, as they should be for an ABC show. There's an appropriately creepy feel to the series, which isn't easy to achieve when filming a blizzard. Helping the spooky art direction and doing an especially fine job embodying evil is Feore as Linoge. This talented actor doesn't hold back at all, giving Linoge a nice evil edge and making the character completely unpredictable (as all good villains should be).
The main complaint about Storm of the Century is the film's length. King likes to take a long time to get to the meat of a story, but Storm could easily be four hours rather than six. That said, King's fans will relish the trip. And it's a trip worth taking, because Storm also has a better than average ending for a King miniseries.
hen Prof. Challenger (McCauley) discovers an injured explorer named Maplewhite in the jungles of South America in the 1930s, he also finds a journal and a photographic plate of something the natives call a Devil Spirit--but which Challenger recognizes as a pterodactyl.
Challenger sees this as an opportunity to prove his theory that dinosaurs still roam the earth. With funding from a beautiful and mysterious benefactor named Miss Crew (Blakely), Challenger mounts an expedition to find the creatures described in Maplewhite's journal. Joining him are an unlikely bunch from the Royal Zoological Society: skeptic Prof. Summerlee (Snow), great white hunter Lord John Roxton (de Vry) and American war correspondent John Malone. The only condition for the financing: Miss Crew wants to come along herself, for reasons known only to her.
The party canoes up the Amazon, threatened by cannibals and crocodiles all the way, and then hacks through dense jungle to the base of a lofty plateau. There they barely escape an ambush by bloodthirsty natives, ascending in a balloon to make their getaway. After rising through a mysterious storm layer, they crash-land in an Edenic paradise. Or at least it seems so, until they encounter giant man-eating plants, a female Robinson Crusoe named Veronica and hostile natives--not to mention the dinosaurs Challenger seeks.
Undaunted, the group sets about collecting evidence of their expedition. But this lost world throws many threats and surprises at them: rapacious tyrannosaurs, menacing pterodactyls and, worst of all, ruthless Neanderthal ape men. Miss Crew, meanwhile, is so intent on finding the secret of the lost world that she's willing to betray a friend. Although the group pulls together to save a native named Assai who has been abducted by the ape men, Crew's secret agenda may be enough to undermine their attempts at escape...
Cheap sets and bad acting
Ostensibly based on the famous novel of the same name by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World is a sorry mish-mash of hoary adventure movie cliches, stereotyped and one-dimensional characters and cheesy action scenes. There are savage cavemen, hair's-breadth escapes, native girls who look like they stepped off a Baywatch set, a tree house that would make the Swiss Family Robinson green with envy, and fat, feather-covered natives. The script--by Jim Henshaw and Peter Mohan--is so predictably bland and unimaginative that someone at one point actually says: "It's quiet all of a sudden. Too quiet."
Compounding the problem is the acting, which is perfunctory at best. The supposedly British characters' accents fade in and out, McCauley hams it up as Challenger, and Blakely is clearly over her head as the brilliant but tough-as-nails heroine who nevertheless looks fetching in a lace tank top. In the manner of a Beverly Hills trophy wife, she spends much of the movie trading unconvincing double entendres with de Vry, and by the end of the film she loses all pretense of Englishness or period accuracy.
The look and feel of the project, meanwhile, suggests that no expense was too small to economize. From makeup to costumes to vehicles to sets, everything is amateurish. One example: footage of native wildlife is so poorly intercut with the live action that it seems like stock video that's simply been inserted Ed-Wood-style. And the ape men are laughably fake.
As for the meager dinosaur effects, they are prehistoric compared with those of Jurassic Park and its sequel, on whose name this film is obviously trying to capitalize. Viewers can see better computer-generated imagery in TV commercials.
