Rising Storm (1989)
★★ — Rising Storm (1989)
Rising Storm arrived in 1989 without much fanfare and, judging by its subsequent obscurity, departed the same way. A co-production filmed in Namibia and South Africa, it belongs to that particular strain of low-budget late-eighties science fiction that took its cues from the post-apocalyptic boom kick-started earlier in the decade, films that saw cheap, sun-baked locations standing in for a civilisation gone wrong. The premise here is a future America, set in 2099, where a theocratic dictatorship run by the Reverend Jimmy Joe II keeps order through armed street patrols and the blunt instrument of fundamentalist doctrine, while a resistance movement known as the Kropfelders pushes back against the regime. It is the kind of satirical political premise that, in the right hands, could have sharpened itself into something pointed. Whether those hands were available is, of course, the question.
The film was directed by Frank Schaeffer, who had a handful of low-budget genre credits to his name around this period, working in the sort of territory where ambition and resources rarely met in the middle. The production's origins in southern Africa give it an unusual texture for an American-flavoured science fiction picture, lending the visuals a dusty, sun-hammered quality that at least distinguishes it from the warehouse dystopias that characterised so many of its contemporaries. Leading the cast is Zach Galligan, who at the time was best known for playing Billy Peltzer in Gremlins and would later return to that world in Gremlins 2: The New Batch. Joining him are Wayne Crawford, June Chadwick and Elizabeth Keifer, alongside the reliably watchable John Rhys-Davies, a performer whose presence in any film tends to lend it a credibility slightly above its actual station. Whether that credibility holds here is another matter entirely.
The film sits in an awkward generic middle ground, credited as action, comedy and science fiction simultaneously, which is either an honest reflection of its tonal ambitions or a warning sign, depending on your appetite for that sort of thing. Polished but unremarkable production values were never really on the cards for a picture like this, and what reaches the screen is very much a product of its budget and its era, scrappy and self-serious in roughly equal measure.
A-Z World Movie Tour Namibia What even is this film? Rising Storm feels like someone threw Mad Max, A Clockwork Orange, and a late-night B-movie script into a blender and hit puree. Set in a dystopian near-future where society is barely holding on and youth gangs run wild, it aims for gritty, surreal chaos but lands somewhere closer to confused and unintentionally funny. The tone lurches from grim prophecy to absurd spectacle without ever deciding what it wants to be. The plot is thin and half-baked. Something about rebellion, control, and a government cracking down on dissent, all filtered through a grimy, sand-soaked lens. The acting is stiff, the dialogue stilted, and the costumes look like they were made from scrap metal and leftover punk gear. It’s all so serious in delivery, yet so ridiculous in execution that it’s hard not to laugh. And then there’s the scene (the infamous “vibrator grenade” moment) which is so bizarre, so utterly out of left field, that it becomes the film’s most memorable (and probably only) highlight. You’ll question whether you saw it right. It’s not without a certain trashy charm. Rhe synth-heavy score is oddly catchy, and the cinematography has flashes of style amid the grime. But as a whole, Rising Storm is a mess: poorly paced, narratively incoherent, and too committed to its own strangeness to realise how silly it is. Still, if you’re in the mood for a cult oddity with a story that makes no sense and moments you’ll never unsee, this forgotten 89-minute trainwreck might just be your kind of chaos.
For me, that combination of po-faced delivery and sheer B-movie lunacy is exactly what makes these forgotten oddities worth revisiting, even when, perhaps especially when, they fall flat on their face. There is something almost endearing about a film that commits so fully to its own strange internal logic without ever quite realising how far outside the lines it has wandered. I have sat through plenty of low-budget late-eighties genre pictures in the course of working through this world movie tour, and Rising Storm lands somewhere in that particular category of films you would never seek out, yet find oddly difficult to forget once seen. Sometimes a trainwreck is its own reward.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 1989 | Watched: 2025-07-27
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Rising Storm (1989) on YouTube
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Watch in the UK
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