Main cast: Steffani Brass (Erica Gallagher), David Gridley (Ryan), Vince Hill-Bedford (Jake), William Lee Scott (Detective Bill Stafford), Tyler Clark (Dani Brooks), Eric Etebari (Detective Adams), John Beasley (Dr Jonathan Brooks), and Tony Todd (Professor Smith)
Director: Benjamin Louis
Ryan and Jake are two obnoxious film students in Professor Smith’s class, and they are determined to make a film that will trounce Dani Brooks’s. Dani is the teacher’s pet for a good reason, and she is also Jake’s ex, so the competition has a personal edge to it. The two idiots decide that their future prize-winning movie would be a Pretty Woman meets slasher flick, and they get Ryan’s girlfriend Erica to play the streetwalker in their masterpiece called, well, Streetwalker.
Oops, someone seems to mistake Erica for a real streetwalker while filming and drags her into their vehicle before zooming off. Ryan and Jake give chase, with Jake, holding the camera all this while, squealing that they need to tell the cops while Ryan insisting that they have no time to do this, or they may just lose sight of Erica.
Well, the found footage thing then reveals itself to be the footage found on an abandoned camera, and now Detectives Bill Stafford and Adams are racing against time to piece together what has happened to those three and hopefully locate them before things get really dire for them.
It turns out that the person that has kidnapped Erica isn’t just an enamored incel, as an unearthed trail of dead bodies will soon tell the detectives…
Stoker Hills, oh boy. This film is going to polarize people, I suspect, because it is a standard story of a killer having kidnapped some victims buried under gimmicks to the point that the story itself is almost forgotten by the end of the film. It’s at first a found footage thing, then a standard detective procedural thriller, then a Saw-wannabe, and on and on.
The final twist is going to get viewers either raging against what they perceive to have been an utter waste of time or applauding. Me, I lean a little towards the former, not because I think the twist is dumb. Rather, it’s a lazy “twist” telegraphed from the very beginning, one that I hope will not happen because it’d be equivalent to that bloke in the original Dallas stepping out of the shower. Of course the movie then employs this “twist” because, hey, why not.
It doesn’t help that Ryan and Jake are super annoying, with the two, especially Jake are just obnoxious. I don’t know why, maybe it’s a requirement of sorts, but the guy holding the camera is once again the most death-worthy one of all the characters, and Jake even has a ear-grating voice to boot. Oh, and as usual, there is no good reason given as to why he needs to keep filming even when his friend is being assaulted, aside from the contrived need of this movie being a quasi-found footage thing.
Still, the movie is pretty well put together, all things considered, and until it completely loses the plot by trying way too hard to be gimmicky, the whole thing is pretty compelling to watch.
In the end, the whole thing will hinge on one’s response to that final scene. That will make or break this movie where the audience is concerned, I’d bet. Me, I’m not too fond of it, and I’m also dismayed by how this movie turns out to be just gimmicks layered over more gimmicks.
Even Tony Todd for once not being the villain, heh, can be seen as a gotcha gimmick. His role is still a glorified cameo, though, like most of his recent film appearances, sigh.
There is something meta about this whole thing, because Professor Smith lauds this kind of film-making, so I can say that Stoker Hills turns out to be just one big tug of the willy on the part of the people behind this thing to show off how smart and awesome they are. As is always the case, their perception surpasses reality.
