Deadly Voltage

The most irritating soundtrack in the history of motion pictures provides an appropriate backdrop to this feeble offering. Weak story, contrived situations, and amateur special effects combine to create a genuine snoozer. The most suspenseful aspect about it is guessing how long it takes the average viewer to reach for the remote.

I had no idea that DEADLY VOLTAGE was a brand new movie when I watched it on TV yesterday. You don't expect to see a film showing on TV in January in the year of its release, but maybe that gives you some idea of just how poor this one is. I fully expected it to have been released around 2002 or 2003, given how tired, dated, and cheap-looking it all is.

Basically, the plot is about a typical family who go on a hiking expedition to do some bonding. You know the types: the females are always fighting and bitchy, the husband is a bore, the kids are irritating. They get caught up in a lightning storm, and that's all that happens. The special effects scenes are few and far between, and very poorly done. There's barely any action or incident, just dull emoting by the characters, and overall the whole thing of a mess. I don't mind disaster movies being cheesy a la The Asylum's output, but I can never forgive them for being dull.

Well I watched it - I fell asleep. Not much of a plot, irritating teens, lacklustre characters with no depth. If you are having trouble sleeping put this on and you will drift off into slumberland pronto.

Right, well the 2016 movie "Deadly Voltage" sadly falls into the same horrible category of laughable, boring, uneventful and horrible CGI and special effects genre that most movies in the natural disaster movies tend to do.

I had a gnawing expectation that "Deadly Voltage" might happen to be one such movie. But I still decided to sit down and watch it on the odd chance that I was actually missing out on a marvelous movie in the natural disaster movie genre. Perhaps I should have checked with IMDb and have seen the movie's rating before I opted to sit down and watch it. But I didn't.

Turns out that writer Renée St. Cyr managed to come up with an idea for a natural disaster movie that involved - and this is where it gets really inventive - a small family that seems to be trailed by the events of the natural disaster. Oh yeah, like we haven't seen that before in just about every other movie in the natural disaster genre. But worse still, director John L'Ecuyer utterly failed to bring the movie to life on the screen in an enjoyable manner.

The storyline in "Deadly Voltage" was so simple that you just had to lean back and ride along, switch off your brain entirely and just enjoy the ride. Well, sadly there wasn't much of a ride here, and even less to enjoy. So don't expect anything grand from writer Renée St. Cyr and director John L'Ecuyer.

The special effects in the movie were passable, sure. But believable or realistic? No. Not even remotely. And a movie in the natural disaster genre needs to have special effects that convince the audience if not outright amaze the audience with its realism. Nothing of that going on in "Deadly Voltage".

The acting in the movie was adequate, taking into consideration the genre and budget of the movie. But keep in mind, the actors and actresses had so very, very little to work with in terms of script, storyline and characters. The characters actually felt like cardboard cutouts milling about like drones, not knowing where to do, what to do, or how to interact. Mike Dopud was actually the most outstanding and memorable of performers in the movie, just a shame that he was held back by the entire movie.

"Deadly Voltage" came and left without as much as leaving a surge or a shock. Pardon the pun. I hadn't heard about this 2016 movie before now in mid-2019 when I stumbled upon it by sheer luck. Oh, and you got to love the cheesy, and blatantly stolen catch phrase on the movie's cover/poster that says "it's electrifying".

"Deadly Voltage" was anything but electrifying. It wasn't even a mild zap across the skin at the top of your fingers.

This is a movie with a bunch of people with no common sense. This movie will leave you thinking, how stupid can you be?