Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

The evil Jared-Syn (a perfectly slimy and hateful portrayal by Mike Preston) terrorizes the small desert planet of Lemuria by sucking the lifeforce out of folks with his storage crystals. It's up to heroic ranger Dogan (stolid Jeffrey Byron) to stop the foul villain. While the basic premise offers a pretty cool blend of Western and science fiction elements complete with the inevitable gunslinger showdown in the middle of a tiny mining town and a fierce tribe of Cyclopean beings standing in for your usual savage Apaches, said nifty premise is undermined by Charles Band's leaden direction, a plodding pace, Alan J. Adler's murky script, and cut-rate (not so) special effects. Despite his three day stubble and funky rock star leather pants, Byron qualifies as a decidedly insipid protagonist who fails to elicit much sympathy from the viewer. Fortunately, Byron's blandness is compensated for by nifty contributions from the always dependable Tim Thomerson as boozy, burnt-out ex-ranger Rhodes and the ever-imposing Richard Moll as tough one-eyed warrior leader Hurok. The lovely Kelly Preston as Dyana makes for a suitably plucky and fetching damsel in distress, veteran character actor Larry Pennell briefly pops up as Dyana's grizzled miner father Aix, and R. David Smith is appropriately repellent as Jared-Syn's vicious and hideously disfigured son Baal. Mac Alhberg's rough, but fairly slick widescreen cinematography makes nice occasional use of strenuous slow motion, offers a few groovy psychedelic and atmospheric smoky visual flourishes, and shoots the dusty'n'desolate locations in an effectively gritty manner. Richard Band's robust'n'rousing orchestral score works overtime to pump some energy into the generally limp proceedings. The action set pieces are competently done and reasonably exciting, but lack that extra zing to pack more of a powerful impact. A strictly passable time-waster.

I saw this in the theaters as a young teen as well. I was very easily entertained then. Still am I'm afraid, but this was - and remains - the worst thing I have ever seen.I generally LOVE bad films; I can find the entertainment buried deeply in the worst dreck but, geez, this had nothing! The acting, the writing, the effects, even the "3-D" was barely there. The directing was pretty much limited to "point the camera at the actors".The title "Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn" gives it away - plot and quality. The producers wanted a film called "Metalstorm", content being more or less irrelevant. And the rest of the movie is summarized after the colon.I have never walked out of a film, but this is the closest I have come yet.

Yes, Jeffrey Byron does resemble Viggo Mortensen. Yes, the talentless Kelly Preston is a movie star to this day (for reasons that utterly escape me). But this tedious attempt to weld together STAR WARS, THE ROAD WARRIOR, a little bit of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and whatever else was handy really only comes alive once Tim Thomerson and Richard Moll are on the screen. Well, that, and the surprisingly exciting score by Richard Band is another plus. But overall, if you get the chance to see METALSTORM, pass it up. For one thing, the cinematography is so badly lit that you'll have a hard time being sure it's the same leading man in many shots. For another, the editing is choppy and distracting during any action scene. For still another, the sand-monsters are about as cornball as they could be. But worst of all--the script is flat and dull, and the directing is lackluster. Give it a miss, you'll never be sorry.

This is about the worst film ever made, with the possible exception of Megaforce. SPOILER: There's no Metalstorm, and Jared-Syn lives!!!!It was originally shown in 3D at theaters, the quality of which gave one headaches for hours afterward.Two questions come to mind w/r/t to the title: One, where in the h*ll is this so-called frickin' metalstorm? Two, when is Jared Syn's "destruction" when he escapes at the very end of the stinking film? Definite MST3K fodder, if MST3K had lasted long enough to work it's way down to this egregious infliction of deep hurting.