Stream Review: Twitch-y Terrifiers
When you're a film critic, filmmakers tend to find you on social media and ask if you'll review their stuff. A lot of the time, that request comes with a couple of false assumptions. For the sake of any who might be reading, I'll list the two big ones:
Number one: they request a review after the film is already out. Virtually no publication I can think of will run a review in a post-release timeframe, with rare exceptions – if it was never screened for press, for instance, or if it's a thing that was on nobody's radar and suddenly turned into a phenomenon. But if it's one of those, you probably wouldn't have to ask me to review it.
Number two: critics seldom get to pick their assignments. The real secret is to figure out who the editor is at a given publication, and hit them up. Side note: if you'd like to contact the editor at the AV Club, who has never officially let me go but simply ghosts me, and ask how come Luke Y. Thompson hasn't done a review there in a while, please feel free.
All of this would matter if, say, I were currently a freelance critic for NerdStuffForPeopleWhoArentNerds.com [is that URL actually available? I don't fact check these things]. However, this is my Substack and I can do whatever I want with it. Like the scrappy underdog filmmakers who reach out to critics directly, I'm the proprietor now of a scrappy underdog site that probably isn't getting invited to Star Wars premieres any time soon. So when Michael Leavy, a multi-hyphenate actor-producer-director best known for working on the Terrifier franchise asked if I'd review his movie now on streaming, I thought to myself that the time was right to say yes to one of these things at last. I do love me some Terrifier, as he surely knows from a cursory glance.
His streaming movie is called, perhaps unsurprisingly, Stream. And it features more Terrifier connections than just the director – Damien Leone did the gore effects, and David Howard Thornton plays one of the silent killers. For horror fans today, that's the equivalent of a horror movie in bygone decades having Tom Savini and Doug Jones; a guarantee that at minimum, the creature acting and the death scenes will deliver. I'm using the term “creature” loosely, but let's just say that with his face hidden, the way Thornton portrays his character is more monstrous than human, even as it's ostensibly the latter.
The cast also features a cavalcade of reliable horror standbys, including Jeffrey Combs, Danielle Harris, Daniel Roebuck, Felissa Rose, Dee Wallace, Mark Holton (“Francis” from Pee-wee's Big Adventure, who has aged into a distinct and unusual character face), and the late Tony Todd. Many movies pull a bait and switch when they have names like this; happily, Combs and Harris play major roles, while the rest are cameos. Todd, whose name is revealed in the opening credits, doesn't show up until the very end, and seems like he's in a completely different movie. Don't call it a spoiler if his name is upfront – though I suspect that's contractual, and the filmmakers would rather have surprised.
It's a trip seeing Harris as a middle-aged mom, even though I know she's not a lot younger than I am. I nonetheless remember her as a child actor when I was a teen, which can feel like a huge gap even if it's not mathematically that many years. That's my baggage, not the film's; but when her character notes that she's “still” got it when it comes to attracting men, it draws on a viewer's knowledge that she's gone from child actor to young adult heartthrob to longtime scream queen before our eyes, over all these years. So when she lectures her onscreen teenage daughter about acting out, she knows we know she knows what she's talking about.
It's important that the pros bring it to this film, because at least initially, it has the off-putting look of a shot-on-video movie where the actors look like actors. You know the ones if you watch a lot of low-budget stuff – the hair and makeup is perfect on even the male characters, and the clothes all look like they came straight off the rack or from the dry cleaner. Only Tim Reid, as an ex-cop named Dave, looks like he actually lived in his wardrobe for more than five minutes before production began. With some older movies, cheap film stock could obscure this kind of detail, but not here. Still, once you know it's essentially offering up the cleanest of canvases for Leone to shower with gore, it's not so bad. Art the Clown always starts off with a pristine white suit too.
The actual lead, more or less, is Charles Edwin Powell as patriarch Roy, who decides to take his family on a spontaneous weekend vacation to a familiar hotel. Harris plays his wife Elaine, Sydney Malakeh (who's what you get when you ask casting for a Lauren LaVera type) is their juvenile delinquent daughter Taylor, and Wesley Holloway their computer-savvy 11 year-old son Kevin. The vacation's already kind of a bust – no wi-fi or spa is working – before masked killers start stalking the halls and murdering people. That's what happens when you check into a place where Jeffrey Combs is the concierge, and he takes payment in cash only. (I'm not sure which is scarier to the youngsters of today.)
The movie doesn't really tip its full hand until almost halfway through the two hour-ish runtime, but the title should give you a pretty big clue. Five killers are at large, four of whom wear masks that look like official Marvel-licensed Venom paintball gear. (I have no idea if that's actually a thing; again, I'm opining, not fact-checking.) The fifth dresses as a plague doctor, because of course he does. Of the masks, one is a voluptuous pigtailed woman showing cleavage, one is basically Bane from the Batman comics, another is Thornton doing familiar Art-like mime stuff, and the fourth is just a generic guy in a mask. It's a quartet archetype that dates at least back to the Fantastic Four – rubber man, hot babe, huge guy, and generic superdude. Hell, add in that fifth who's an evil masked doctor, and the connections become even more apparent.
Needless to say, this is not that “elevated horror” you've been hearing so much about every time A24 or Neon releases a movie about a serial killer. This is low horror, what we might have once called a drive-in-style horror, though those were primarily shot on film back in the day. The goal of Stream is to give you violent kills, titillation, one pretty explicit sex scene (which leads into a kill, naturally), and actors doing wacky bits – Jeffrey Combs, in particular, seems to have been told to do whatever he wants so long as it plays to the cheap seats, and he obliges. Would you have it any other way? The kills start subtle and judicious, but eventually level up to what fans expect from Leone. The production values here are lower than on the Terrifier films, so don't expect the same degree of shocking realism, but you can expect an equivalent gross-out factor. And Leavy evidently has more libido than Leone, who often seems like he'd prefer to slice up genitalia than stimulate them. I hate to cite Joe Bob Briggs since he went Proud Boy-adjacent as a contributor to Taki's Magazine, but Stream follows his 3 B's (blood, breasts, beasts) and the Texas Chainsaw law that in a good slasher, anyone can die at any time.
For what it is, though, Stream is a bit long at two hours and change. This isn't Terrifier 2, suddenly dumping a bunch of cosmic mythology on top of an evil clown story. It's a battle royale flick; a fight to the last person in a confined space (the hotel's exterior doors all lock everyone inside pretty quickly). It's to the credit of the script – by Leavy, Jason Leavy, Steven Della Salla, and Robert Privitera – that we care about the lead family enough not to want any of them to die (but knowing some surely will). As for the secondary characters, however, they all get bizarre bits of business to stand out, but some of that could surely have been trimmed. It's fun to see Daniel Roebuck show up as a drunk asshole, for example, but one scene of it is enough to convey the point. When it comes to Taylor's dual love interests with atrocious French accents, the less the better; I was honestly hoping that a plot point would reveal them to be faking.
In other words, if you're planning to drink beer while viewing, as you can and should since it's streaming, you might have to pause a time or two for some “streaming” of your own. Not that you'll lose track of the plot, which is pretty much just full speed ahead until the finale adds a few wrinkles, and of course a potential sequel hook.
I'm not sure that I'd care about a franchise, for reasons it would be spoileriffic to reveal. As a one-off, though, Stream is one of those B-flicks that actually delivers what you expect from those involved, rather than simply using them as window dressing and cover-bait. “From the people who made Terrifier” means, mostly, just what one might hope it would.
Minus all the Catholicism.
Stream is now available for rental or purchase at most VOD sites.
(all images courtesy of Fuzz on the Lens Productions)