By JOEL HARLEY
If Jamie Blanks’ STORM WARNING felt like a throwback to the rape-revenge films of the 1970s, that’s because the screenplay had been knocking around for decades before it got made. Written by the late Everett DeRoche (Long Weekend, Razorback, Road Games), it’s a mean and nasty work of Ozploitation which somehow ended up stranded in 2007.
The story resurfaces again in Brett McBean’s novelization for Encylopocalypse Publications. This is the second of DeRoche’s screenplays to be adapted by McBean, who previously did the same for Long Weekend. Tragically, Blanks (who remade Long Weekend in 2008 and provides a gushing foreword here) passed away earlier this year, making this adaptation a doubly bittersweet read.
STORM WARNING follows French artist Pia (Nadia Farès in the film) and her husband Rob (Robert Taylor), whose sailing trip in Western Port, Australia, goes awry when he ignores the titular storm warning. Taking shelter on a remote island, the pair find themselves (nearly) naked and afraid, and stuck in the podunk middle of nowhere. Salvation seems at hand when they happen across a local homestead, although the weed farm located inside is a bit of a worry.
Such fears are far from unfounded. Rob and Pia topple from the frying pan into the fire when they encounter the family who live there – brothers Brett and Jimmy, and their sadistic “Poppy.” Volvo-driving yuppie Rob attempts to defuse the situation, but it quickly becomes clear that the menfolk have perverse designs on his wife. With the brothers making short work of Rob, it’s up to Pia to launch her own defence, breaking out the toolbox to turn the tables.
McBean’s adaptation of the story does a great job of selling Pia and Rob’s utter vulnerability. The couple’s arrival on French Island and subsequent induction into the redneck house of horrors had me shivering in sympathy. So too, the increasing sense of tension as the brothers’ microaggressions turn macro, graduating to full-scale violence and sexual assault. If the film made for disturbing viewing, then this book is even more discomforting for the knowledge of what’s to come.
McBean plays into that, particularly during the infamous “penis fly trap” sequence, which manages to be even more traumatic on the page. A horrified Rob is all of us when he realises what’s going on:
“When it clicked, Rob made an audible ‘ugh’ sound and his balls shrivelled, his cock retreated.”
This extends to the rest of the story’s violence, which is eked out for pages on end in a way that the film’s modest budget would never have allowed for. This is no rote retread, and McBean takes the opportunity to get deep under the characters’ skin – both metaphorically and surgically. It’s queasy reading, but McBean does a good job of not losing sight of Pia’s agency as the threat of sexual violence ramps up. Occasionally it goes a bit too far in the other direction (making Rob such a wet wipe that it’s hard to see why she’d be interested in him in the first place), but the characterisation of Pia and the family makes it worth enduring his nonsense for.
Similarly, some of the dialogue can come across as a bit tin-eared and excessively waffly. However, this too is made bearable for the flourishes elsewhere, in some of the more brilliantly sweary one-liners, or Pia’s “penis fly trap” exchange with her husband. Again, it’s Rob letting the side down, his tiresome debates with Pia making the character come across as even more of a spare part. He could probably have been excised from the book altogether if it didn’t need his constant fuck-ups to keep the story going.
And keep going, it does, at a pace which makes its missteps easy to overlook. Like the film it’s based on, STORM WARNING is a rough-and-ready work of throwback Ozzie horror. It’s brash and unpleasant, using the book’s infinite budget to make its characters suffer even more, for better and worse. Batten down the hatches.
