It’s vacation time for friends and family, which means nothing is going to go right in this trio of slashers.
STREAM (2024)
Go into Stream with a bunch of your horror fiend friends and a big bowl of popcorn plus plenty of cherry cola, and then sit back and revel in the gnarly, gory practical effects, rockin’ kills, sex and nudity, four masked maniacs, and the numerous horror icon appearances.
The storyline is a bit problematic with several plot holes, but the movie is jam-packed with horror action and death scenes that will have everyone at your watch party crying out with shock and delight at the gruesome and brutal kill sequences. The body count is quite high, so the action rarely lets up once it begins, but that just proves a really important point about filmmaking. No matter how high energy a movie is, it should not be two hours long. Ugh. Even though we were eating up the chaos, at about the 75-minute mark of this 2-hour movie, we started shifting into “there’s still 45 minutes left?” mode.
Who better to open the movie than Dee Wallace? She’s a house cleaner at a hotel, and I’m pretty positive that when she’s attacked by a masked killer, the scene is an homage to her death scene in Rob Zombie’s Halloween.
Next we meet a family that checks into the same hotel. Danielle Harris is the mother, and I’ll never stop finding it weird to see her playing the parent of teenagers.
The hotel clerk is Jeffrey Combs, Dave Sheridan looks adorable as a bartender, Tim Reid of WKRP is a detective, and Terrifier David Howard Thornton is one of the four killers.
Felissa Rose pops in momentarily later in the movie, and the late Tony Todd makes an appearance at the very end. Meanwhile, we were left wondering what happened to two other anticipated cameos based on the cast list: Bill Moseley and Tim Curry. Turns out they are both in a fairly long scene that drops somewhere in the middle of the closing credits. Here’s the really weird part. We never see Tim Curry. He is in a wheelchair and wearing a mask he doesn’t take off, which sort of defeats the purpose of a cameo.
The most notable plot problem is that the bulk of the concept isn’t presented until more than halfway through the movie after only being hinted at earlier. For most of the movie it seems like guests have simply booked rooms at a really bad hotel where there just happen to be four masked killers being harbored. However, the actual premise is eventually revealed when loads of people have already died—there’s some sort of streaming “game” taking place in which people watch the action live and place bets on which killer will score the best and most kills.
Once the main point of all this murder and mayhem is finally revealed, it suddenly feels like a reset, as if one film ended and you’re now watching a different movie. Not sure what the intention was for laying it all out this way, but you just have to go with the new vibe and enjoy the continuation of the kills.
Despite its flaws, Stream is still a satisfying hack ‘n’ slash flick, and I will definitely add it to my collection if it gets a physical media release. Oh. Did I mention the mega-muscled killer in overalls? I didn’t? Well, he alone is worth the price of a disc, and he lands this one on the stud stalking page.
DEAD TEENAGERS (2024)
The director of the gay horror flick The Exorcism of Saint Patrick opts for a more mainstream, cabin in the woods slasher of sorts, although there is a little lesbianism depending on which storyline you’re in at any given moment. See, Dead Teenagers tries so hard to be as complex as meta can be that it becomes an almost indecipherable sequence of branching plot possibilities. Think Happy Death Day if it was nearly impossible to follow.
There’s this group of friends staying at a house in the woods. The main girl finds a bunch of script pages in the forest, and apparently that causes the kids to end up immersed in the plot of the script.
I was lost almost from the start. There are signs of a cool killer wearing a welding mask and flashes of gory kills, but this is predominantly a movie in which the characters sit around trying to figure their way out of their predicament—in between bringing up religion quite a few times.
I could not follow the plot at all. It becomes a repetitive cycle of everyone acting weird and turning on the main girl, who they feel caused this whole situation by finding the script. What’s missing most from this film about kids trapped in a slasher script is an actual slasher.
Things get even more confusing when there are multiple faux endings, complete with the credits beginning to roll. It’s meta taken to the extreme. There’s even a moment when the main girl experiences flashes of scenes from The Exorcism of Saint Patrick.
LATE CHECKOUT (2023)
This 69-minute movie is like speed slashing. This is how you do a low budget slasher—just get to the point and check off all the essential tropes along the way.
It starts with a sex scene, a man in panties, and brutal kills as Night of the Living Dead plays on a TV in the background.
Next we meet a group of friends renting a cabin in the woods. There’s a splash of relationship drama, a dash of partying montage, and then a killer in a welding mask starts taking out victims one after the other.
The kills come quick, and they’re bloody, with practical effects. A cop shows up just long enough to die, the two final girls are lesbians, and Felissa Rose even shows up to add some extra insanity to the final moments of the movie.
Killer motive is basically irrelevant, and there’s a little twist if you stick around for the scene that takes place after the credits begin rolling. This is a satisfying quicky if you just need a fast slasher fix.
