'STOKER HILLS' REVIEW: RELEASED TODAY DIGITIALLY VIA 101 FILMS
THE PLOT
Three college students set out to film a horror movie for their final class project, but during filming something goes terribly wrong, and they suddenly find themselves in a nightmare worse than they could have written.
THE REVIEW
I’ve seen terrible movies. Shit, I almost exclusively exist for terrible movies. As time marches on, and I am laid naked before my principal enemies of a bad back, greying hair, a browning penis, and the inability to stand up as quickly as I used to, I find myself ensconced deeper and deeper inside the philosophy of absurdism. My dalliances with said philosophy have generally, amongst other things, allowed me to find a form of twisted merit to the worst that art has to offer, particularly where cinema is concerned, and, to paraphrase Henry Miller, “I believe that today more than ever, a garbage movie should be sought after even if it has only has one hilariously brilliant scene in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul”.
Now, splicing found-footage and gritty, detective procedural together might sound appealing to some, and like an absolute clown-nightmare to others. I find myself falling into the former camp, personally, and I’d never seen anything quite like that before I’d seen STOKER HILLS. But in my unrelenting pursuit of that toenail of merit, that was the only unique experience I was able to extrapolate from the film.
STOKER HILLS suffers from a plethora of issues, none of which can be glossed over in order to justify the time spent locked in a seemingly perpetual state of utter bewilderment at the shitty script and even shittier acting. Such is their individual frequency that it soon becomes something of a post-modern philosophical quandary; what came first? The hackneyed dialogue or the way in which it seems to spill from the maw like raw sewage from an outlet pipe? If it sounds like I’m being unnecessarily harsh on the film as a whole, that’s because I am. There is no greater affront to the concept and execution of art than banality, and STOKER HILLS brandishes its banality like the smallest dick waving the biggest gun at a Trump rally.
I don’t mean to get on at film students per se, I’m sure there are a lot of you guys out there that despise the stereotype as much as I, but stereotypes exist for a reason, and STOKER HILLS ain’t doing much to help dispel it. Jake (VINCE HILL-BEDFORD) and Ryan (DAVID GRIDLEY) are two douchebag, college-age film students tasked by their Professor (TONY TODD) to produce a feature film as part of their final assignment. Jake proudly announces that he and Ryan are working on a horror movie about zombie prostitutes called “Street Walkers” which is based off of the popularity of THE WALKING DEAD; a reference which immediately dates the script since THE WALKING DEAD hasn’t been popular for at least 6 years. Whilst in the midst of filming establishing shots of Ryan’s girlfriend, Erica (STEFFANI BRASS), she is abducted by an unknown assailant and bundled into a Bundy Mobile. Jake and Ryan give chase and eventually track the abductor to an abandoned warehouse out on Stoker Hills. A flurry of asinine dialogue is audibly shared between the pair from this point until the point where Detectives Stafford (WILLIAM LEE SCOTT) and Adams (ERIC ETEBARI), one of whom goes hell for leather with their best JOE PESCI, retrieve Jake’s camera from the crime scene, along with a plentiful supply of sub-MARCUS NISPEL, 2003 TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE ephemera from the warehouse. A race against time ensues (quite literally; an actual ticking clock graphic decides, at about three quarters of the way through the film, to flash up on screen from time to time, and which serves no purpose other than to have made me wonder what I, as a product of millions of years of evolution, have done with my life) to locate Jake, Ryan, and Erica using the found-footage to mount an investigation.
The plot, while reasonably lean and uncomplicated, is disconnected, and while it’s not necessarily difficult to comprehend the journey from Point A to Point B, it is difficult to give a shit about it. The police procedural aspects would have been far more interesting if less time had been devoted to the high-fivery of Jake and Ryan during the initial set up, and certainly there would have been less puzzlement at the Detectives’ physically abrupt but emotionally passive insertion into the proceedings. The film’s twist climax will also undoubtedly leave you wondering whether punching yourself repeatedly in the groin for 90 minutes would have been a less painful experience.
Ultimately, STOKER HILLS’ indecisiveness as to what it wants to be is as orchestrative to its failure as its dreadful script and the loaded delivery of the dialogue. At points it’s everything you’ve come to loathe about the found-footage genre, and at others it’s like SE7EN if that movie had been made by M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN post-2001. And the worst part about it? It’s not even funny.
STOKER HILLS is available digitally from today via 101 FILMS.