Back in June the Sci-Fi Channel was scheduled to premiere an original movie entitled NYC: Tornado Terror. Days before its premiere a real-life tornado struck a Boy Scout camp in Iowa killing several kids. The Sci-Fi Channel pulled the film claiming they did so out of respect for the week’s tragedy. Now, on the very day Hurricane Ike ransacked parts of Texas, the Sci-Fi Channel did not pull their premiere of Ba’al: The Storm God, in which all of mankind is threatened by a super-sized storm of supernatural proportions.
Then again, given how little storm-related destruction there is in Ba’al: The Storm God, odds are they figured there’s no way anyone could possibly question the timing. When I watch a movie about a demon storm I expect to see some seriously unholy amounts of mass destruction. All I got were very brief, unconvincingly computer generated scenes of Big Ben and the Golden Gate Bridge getting annihilated and a couple violent downbursts. Given the apocalyptic nature of this hellstorm, there’s very little that’s apocalyptic depicted on the screen. Not having the budget to show us much of Ba’al’s destructive meteorological superpowers and downplaying that Ba’al is a sentient god in the form of an ever-growing mega hurricane stifles what starts out as a potentially unique supernatural disaster flick. As far as hellstorms go, Ba’al: The Storm God doesn’t have anything on Hurricane Katrina.
