Ah yes, Shadows of the Storm, the forgotten 1988 fever dream of a movie that dares to ask, “What if Edgar Allan Poe came back to life just to punch the screenwriter in the face?” This cinematic oddity stars Eric Roberts in full “my agent has stopped returning calls” mode and Ned Beatty, who you can tell realized halfway through filming that this paycheck might not be worth it.
It’s a film so drenched in wannabe Gothic atmosphere that it might as well be dipped in candle wax and read aloud at a Hot Topic employee orientation. A film so enamored with brooding monologues and dramatic eye contact that it forgets to include things like suspense, pacing, or any reason for you to keep watching.
So let’s grab our black velvet cloaks, pour ourselves a goblet of cheap red wine, and wander into this damp, rambling, pretentious pile of nonsense.
Eric Roberts: Drenched in Sweat, Drowning in Dialogue
Eric Roberts plays Alex, a writer suffering from that most deadly of cinematic diseases: Writer’s Block—which, in movies, always manifests as either a drinking problem, hallucinations, or long walks in graveyards while whispering cryptic poetry. Here, he goes for all three.
Alex is holed up in a crumbling coastal mansion with a haunted typewriter, an existential crisis, and a voiceover so purple it could bruise you. He’s supposedly writing the Great American Novel™ but spends most of his time pacing, brooding, and looking like he just smelled a rotting onion.
Roberts delivers his lines like he’s trying to seduce his own reflection. Every sentence drips with overcooked intensity. It’s less acting and more erotic sighing with punctuation. Watching him try to emote through the fog of overwriting is like watching someone wrestle with a thesaurus during a panic attack.
Ned Beatty: Wandering Through the Wreckage
Ned Beatty plays a mysterious visitor named Boley—sort of a cross between a forgotten English professor and a bourbon commercial. He’s the wildcard, the conscience, the mentor, the comic relief, the antagonist, and maybe the Devil? Honestly, the film can’t decide, and neither can he.
Beatty spends most of his screen time delivering cryptic lines that sound deep until you realize they’re just empty calories of faux-intellectual gibberish. Something like:
“The storm, Alex… the storm is within.”
Thanks, Ned. Very helpful. That clears up nothing. Now please go back to making Deliverance sequels or selling insurance.
The Plot: A Hurricane of Hot Air
The “story”—and I use that term loosely—follows Alex as he unravels mentally, emotionally, and literarily, all while a literal storm brews outside. Is the storm a metaphor? Is anything real? Is Boley a ghost, a figment, a critic from The New Yorker? The movie doesn’t know, and by the time you realize that, it’s too late.
There are flashbacks, dream sequences, and long-winded speeches that sound like bad community theater productions of The Tell-Tale Heart. At one point, Roberts even screams at the sea. The sea, people. That’s how deep we’re going.
You keep waiting for something to happen—anything. A revelation, a murder, a decent line of dialogue. But no. What you get instead is a swirling miasma of self-importance dressed in fog machine mist and voiceover riddles.
The Dialogue: So Purple It’s Practically Ultra-Violet
If you’ve ever wanted to hear a man say, “Her lips were like midnight sighs across a wounded dusk” with a straight face, Shadows of the Storm is your jam. The film is absolutely bloated with overwrought narration that sounds like it was written by a goth teenager after reading one page of Poe and chugging two bottles of Robitussin.
No one talks like a human being. They talk like rejected characters from a Clive Barker fever dream trying to win a poetry slam in a haunted lighthouse.
And the worst part? They think they’re being profound. Every line delivered with hushed reverence, every metaphor stretched like taffy until it snaps back and hits you in the eye.
The Storm Itself: The Real Star of the Movie
There’s a hurricane in this film, in case the title didn’t tip you off. It looms in the background, occasionally rattles a window, and then just sort of… is. It’s supposed to symbolize Alex’s inner turmoil. Or maybe creative destruction. Or maybe it’s just there to justify the fog budget.
But as storms go, it’s about as threatening as a heavy drizzle. And like everything else in the film, it builds to nothing. No climax. No release. Just wind, rain, and an overwhelming sense of meh.
Production Design: A Warehouse of Damp Books and Melancholy Lamps
Visually, the film tries. It wants to be stylish. The old house is filled with dusty books, flickering candles, ominous portraits, and windows that constantly rattle even when it’s sunny. But after twenty minutes, it stops being atmosphere and starts feeling like someone got drunk at a Halloween store and set up the fog machine in grandma’s living room.
And the lighting—oh boy. Everything is either lit like a funeral or like a perfume ad for dead poets. Shadows swirl, candles flicker, and occasionally, someone walks slowly down a hallway for dramatic effect. Over. And over. And over.
Final Thoughts: The Real Horror is the Runtime
Shadows of the Storm is the cinematic equivalent of someone reading their tortured high school journal to you in a thunderstorm. It wants to be psychological horror. It wants to be literary. It wants to be profound. But what it is… is boring.
It’s a movie that confuses being slow for being smart, and moodiness for meaning. A film where the characters never shut up, but you learn absolutely nothing. It’s the kind of movie you finish and immediately Google just to make sure you didn’t hallucinate the whole thing.
At the end, you don’t feel frightened or moved or even slightly disturbed. You just feel like you’ve been trapped in a foggy room with two overacting weirdos and a typewriter that only produces bad metaphors.
Rating: 2/10 — Like listening to Poe while being slowly smothered by a wet blanket. Avoid unless you’re studying self-indulgent cinema or have a storm fetish.
