Storm (1987 film)

Cast

New version

23 minutes of additional material added in 1987 was requested by The Cannon Group, Inc. to bring the film up to feature-length for theatrical distribution in Canada and the United States. This addition met with mixed reviews as Globe and Mail author Stephen Godfrey wrote in his “A Storm Warning” article. He said “the scenes are as refreshing as the rest of the film and show Winning’s talent for creating suspense and sympathy. But the structure of the film is now unbalanced; in its original form, Storm was an elaborate tease, a cat-and-mouse game that escalated gradually...” The new segments were filmed in the winter of January 1987 in Bragg Creek and Calgary, Alberta with the original cast.

Distribution and theatrical release

Storm was picked up by Cannon Films Cannon International for worldwide distribution in December 1986. The Canadian theatrical release was handled separately by Thomas Howe Associates of Vancouver, Canada with a premiere in Calgary November 26, 1987 followed by a Canadian theatrical run. Storm also ran theatrically in Los Angeles in December 1989 to qualify for the Academy Awards and was reviewed positively by the LA Times.

Reception

Kevin Thomas, of the LA Times called the movie taut, ambitious and darkly comic in a 1989 review. He said the film worked very effectively as a comment on the male psyche and how lethal the mix of fear and aggression can be when men have a need to prove their masculinity for reasons imagined or real. Globe and Mail writer Jay Scott in an August 28, 1985 review called it a remarkable new thriller and a comic combination of Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Deliverance. Peter Goddard of the Toronto Star wrote Winning’s sense of movement within a scene is already masterly. He could make ice melting seem exciting. And Fred Haeseker in a November 1987 Calgary Herald review said it’s a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of time-honored shock effects and rite-of-passage clichés, seen with a sense of humor that is usually missing from the pictures that spawned them.