Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

What a beautiful movie!

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

"Meteorologist Ron Young (Luke Perry) has been recruited to assist renegade Air Force General Roberts (Martin Sheen) in a top-secret government operation to manipulate the weather. On board a specially rigged plane, they launch their device into the eye of a massive weather front off California, which quickly accelerates to hurricane winds over 400 mph. But when an onboard struggle for control ensues, the race is on to secure the storm device and stop the unbridled rampage about to wreak havoc in L.A. This time, the City of Angels doesn't have a prayer!" according to the DVD description.Apparently re-titled "Storm Tracker" to distinguish it from other storms.This was obviously made for the home video and/or cable TV market. Still struggling to break-out of "Beverly Hills 90210", Mr. Perry pulled in some viewers, with Mr. Sheen adding his well-respected name to the cast. Both actors dip generously into their bags of acting tricks, and give the script all they can for the money. Sheen's daughter Renee Estevez (as Andrea McIntyre) appears as Perry's TV reporter love interest. The structure and "controlling the weather" story recycled for "Storm" is quite good, and it could have been a big-budget cinema hit. Perry and the plot re-surfaced in 2009.***** Storm (8/11/99) Harris Done ~ Luke Perry, Martin Sheen, Robert Knott, Renee Estevez

***SPOILERS*** Not all that bad direct to video movie involving the manipulation of storms and hurricanes by a rouge unit of the CIA.It's this playing God that in the end jeopardizes the city of Los Angeles when the person in charge of this black ops operation Gen. James Roberts, Martain Sheen, is found out, in what he's really up to, by the two top man running the project Doctors Ron Young & Daniel Platt, Luke Perry & David Moses. It turns out that Gen. Roberts has been involved in weather manipulation since he was in Vietnam and now he's doing it here in the US. This has cost over the years hundreds of people to be killed in a number of man made hurricanes, like Andrews in August 1992, that the General had created with this gadget of his, an in flight electro magnetic generator,in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.Working secretly with the major oil companies Gen. Roberts is now, without those under him knowing, planning to start up a major five category hurricane, or typhoon, on the west coast of Mexico. This mad plan on Gen. Roberts' part is to devastate that country and force it to both come to he US for emergency aid as well as stop, which is the real reason of Roberts plan, from nationalizing it's oil wells! An act that in effect would put the international oil companies, that Roberts is working for, out of business!Not as far fetched as you would think since manipulating the weather is a fool proof method of causing havoc on a nations population and military establishment without, being that it's an Act of God, those doing it being blamed for it! And thus rule out military retaliation by the targeted country.It's when both Dr. Young and Platt get wind, no pun intended, of Gen. Roberts insane plan of wiping out an entire Mexican town with it's thousands of inhabitants that they go into action in bringing his mad dream of both controlling the weather and thus the world to an end.Like a genie let out of a bottle once Gen. Roberts plan was set into motion it was almost impossible to stop it. Dr. Platt in refusing to both intensify and then guide, with the electro magnetic generator, the Pacific typhoon to make landfall is murdered, or orders of Gen, Roberts, by his co-pilot before he could guide the storm back to sea.***SPOILERS*** It's now up to Dr. Young who at the time is under arrest, in him being set up by Roberts in a hit and run accident, to both finish the job that the ill fated Dr. Platt started! With the now rampaging killer storm, with the out of control electro magnetic generator guiding it, heading straight for Los angles it's up to Dr. Young to keep it from making landfall and wiping the city off the map. It's also in Gen Roberts best interest to get Dr. Young freed to do the job or else he'll have to answer for the deaths of thousands of American citizens. What Roberts is also planning is to disappeared, or have murdered, Dr. Young after he completed his mission!Better then you would expect since we've been hit by a number of 3 4 and 5 category hurricanes, like depicted in the movie, over the last few years since the film "Storm Tracker" was released. Like were told in the movie, by non other then the deranged Gen. Roberts, that the weather can be the most effective weapon of mass destruction in history. In that its both impersonal and deathly effective at the same time. It was the very ironic fact that Gen. Roberts grandiose plan of using the weather to achieve his, and those who employ him, aims had finally been made public, by Dr. Young, that had him offed by the very people that he was working for!

As a confirmed "B" movie lover (and someone who wishes to amass a large DVD collection as cheaply as possible), I regularly haunt the "Dollar DVD" rack at my local Wal-Mart searching for low-budget gems. My latest acquisition is "Storm," (A.K.A. "Storm Trackers," according to the front of the DVD box), a late-90s made-for-TV disaster movie starring onetime teen heart throb Luke Perry (of "90210" fame) and Martin Sheen. (!!) How can you go wrong with that powerhouse combo? I expected a laugh riot when I sat down to watch this one, but I have to admit, it was far better than I expected (barring a few cheesy moments, particularly in the last fifteen minutes or so). Perry plays a meteorology professor (aided by a hippie assistant played by Marc McClure, best known as Jimmy Olsen in the '70s "Superman" films) whose experiments with storm technology are deemed too dangerous by his university and result in him losing his job. Fortunately for him, just as he's packing up his office, he's approached by a government representative who offers him a job working on a hush-hush military project headed by an Army general (Sheen), whose objective is to actually control the direction of powerful storms. Perry joins up immediately and at first thinks he's working on a project that will not only save lives (by diverting dangerous storms away from populated areas) but also bring much needed rain to drought stricken parts of the world. Of course, it doesn't take him long to figure out that the true aim of the project is something more sinister, and that Sheen's character intends to use storm control as a defensive weapon. The last half of the film then descends into predictable disaster-movie chaos, as the research team attempts to steer a hurricane into Mexico but loses control of it so that it heads directly for downtown Los Angeles. Perry then attempts to re-gain control of the storm from an airplane before it can flatten L.A. (and endanger his girlfriend, a local TV news reporter out in the thick of the chaos). Most of the L.A.-set disaster scenes are rather underwhelming due to the low made-for-TV budget (most of it seems to be cobbled together out of old Weather Channel storm footage) aside from one funny bit in which a wind-blown hunk of the Hollywood sign nearly flattens a TV news crew. The climactic battle between Perry and a government goon in front of an open airplane cargo door (with the hurricane raging right outside) is downright silly, particularly when Perry leaps OUT of the plane and ONTO the storm controlling device (!!) in order to re-program it and divert the storm away from Los Angeles. Yeah, okay, suuuuuuuure, that MIGHT happen...if you totally disregard the laws of physics. Aside from the occasionally hilarious lapses in logic and cheap looking special effects, STORM TRACKER was a fast-paced adventure story that had pretty decent performances by its stars (Sheen is totally slumming in this flick of course, but nobody can play a blustering, obsessed military type quite like him) that turned out to be entertaining enough action melodrama, especially since I only paid a buck for it. My fellow Dollar DVD aficionados (and I know there are a lot of you out there) can pick this one up with confidence.

The Storm is so cheesy, so fake that it's not even funny to watch. Terrible special effects, not only feeling fake, but looking fake too. Aside of terrible acting, we get to watch unconvincing plot too. To summarise: a disaster movie with almost no casualties, and with a happy ending.