Main cast: Joseph Winter (Shawn Ruddy) and Melanie Stone (Chrissy)
Directors: Vanessa Winter and Joseph Winter

While found footage and its equivalent are normally not my first choice of movies to watch—don’t laugh, but I tend to get motion sickness sometimes while trying to follow all the shaky cams—Deadstream is a cute little comedy that combines horror and an incisive satirical look at the influencer culture.

I know, I know, the whole skewering of influencers thing has been done to death by now, and often with lamentable results, but this practically homegrown thing, which sees the small number of folks behind it multitasking in everything, does the skewering without being heavy handed or sanctimonious. Thus, the movie is a whole lot funnier and more clever as a result.

Shawn Ruddy was once a hot shot YouTube and LivVid content creator, doing Jackass-style stunts and generally being a prat all around on his channel Wrath of Shawn, until a vaguely alluded-to scandal caused him to be cancelled. Apparently it involved a stunt that caused great hurt or even the death of some poor fellow with cancer or something and charges were filed against him, oops.

Anyway, six months later, he’s back and as part of his ongoing “apology” tour, he’s facing the fears and, of course, live-streaming it to his audience. His latest stunt is to face his fear of ghosts, so he will spend a night in the allegedly super haunted Death Manor.

Sure, it’s said to be haunted by the wrathful ghost of Mildred Pratt, who committed suicide after losing her beau and seeing her budding career as a poet cut short, but hey, there’s nothing the wrath of Shawn can’t face… right?

The first 20 minutes or so of this one sees Shawn just clowning around and talking to his audience. I have to say here: Joseph Winter really has the mannerisms of an obnoxious, narcissistic, and disingenuous influencer down pat, from the way of enunciating all the way to the body language as well as the “there is nothing I can’t plug at any time” attitude.

However, I soon become as restless as Shawn’s audience in the chat room as they call him to do something, anything. 

That’s when the fun starts, because you see, Shawn is a genre-blind dummy stumbling around in a haunted house littered with figurative red buttons and warning ticker tapes. He cheerfully presses each red buttons and stumble over those ticker tapes, so to speak, in his ignorance and holy crap, the terrible things he unleashes onto himself as a result.

Here’s where things get tad weird, because I start to actually root for and even like Shawn. When his back is against the wall, that dude is a fighter with a never say die attitude that I can’t help liking, and maybe it’s pity on my part, but he actually morphs from twatwaffle into an unlikely fun protagonist to cheer on. It also helps that this fellow is a coward at heart, making him more relatable and his fighting back all the more plucky.

Shawn is like a more cynical version of Shaggy, in other words, and he’s actually quite adorable in a pathetic sort of way.

Anyway, this one is full of a familiar haunted house tropes that are cleverly fashioned to be homages to classic films of that genre. The practical effects are also solid for a film of clearly not-that-big budget.

The MVP here, however, is Joseph Winter, who throws down and embraces his role like a long time pro with great comedic timing. Watching him here is a blast, and a very enjoyable one at that!

So yes, there is nothing truly dead in Deadstream. If anything, it helps breathe a little life to a genre that is getting stale!