Review: Stream (2024)

Stream (2024)

Not rated

Score: 2 out of 5

Stream is a fairly forgettable, ho-hum movie, but one that would've made for a great video game. Specifically, it would've been a great modern-day remake of Manhunt, the classic and infamous 2003 survival horror game by Rockstar Games, the makers of the Grand Theft Auto series, in which you play as a death row inmate who is spared execution only to be forced into a snuff film operation. That, or it would've made for a great asymmetric multiplayer horror game in the mold of Dead by Daylight in which multiple people play as both the killers and their victims, with the former side scoring points by killing and the latter side doing so by surviving and escaping. It's rather appropriate, too, given that the film's basic premise concerns a shadowy criminal organization that has trapped a bunch of ordinary vacationers in a hotel to be hunted down by a group of masked slashers, the entire thing filmed and livestreamed for the enjoyment of sickos around the world. Not only is this quite similar to the plot of Manhunt, it also revolves heavily around the world of online streaming, something that is now part and parcel of video game culture, including one major character being an adolescent boy who streams himself playing video games.

And yet, despite this simple but golden premise, solid production values, sweet kills, cool killers, and Jeffrey Combs hamming it up as the villain, it just ultimately didn't come together as a good movie. The problems all came down to the story, which was overlong, took half the movie to get going, was so paper-thin with its satire of streaming that I can barely call it half-hearted in that regard, and was filled with throwaway characters who contributed nothing, existed only to die in creative ways, and had me muttering the Eight Deadly Words -- "I don't care what happens to these people" -- by the halfway point. This is a movie that people only paid any attention to in the first place because it was produced by Damien Leone and the rest of his crew from the Terrifier films, even though his creative involvement was limited to the admittedly cool special effects work. The best comparison I can think of is to the first film in The Purge series, a movie that had a very interesting premise that turned out to be ripe for a franchise but unfortunately blew the execution on the first go-around. I'd love to see a sequel that fixes all the problems that this film has, but I can't recommend it on its own merits.

Of the many characters we get among the people being hunted for sport, the only ones who get any focus beyond just serving as more bodies for the pile are the Keenan family, who serve as our protagonists, and Dave Burham, an older gentleman who turns out to be a detective investigating the people behind the carnage. Traveling through on their way to an amusement park, the Keenans consist of the father Roy, the mother Elaine, the rebellious teenage daughter Taylor, and the adolescent streamer son Kevin, and to be honest, I couldn't bring myself to care about any of them. Roy is a fairly flat hero, Kevin is little more than a prop, Elaine exists only to add another entry to the list of characters Danielle Harris has played in horror movies who get killed off brutally, and Taylor's motivations switch on a dime, at one point hating her parents and running away with a French guy she met at the hotel only to get cold feet and a sudden pang of "but I still love my family!" for no reason except to justify her returning to the film (and to create suspicion around the French guy that goes nowhere). As for Burham, he's blatantly telegraphed as a guy with a hidden agenda so early on that the big twist that he's actually part of the game not only wasn't a surprise, it ruined the film's attempts to create suspicion around the other people in the hotel. The actors were all acceptable, but they were saddled with such worthless nothing characters that their efforts were wasted.

What's more, the film asks me to spend an hour with these worthless nothings before it actually gets to the goods. I get what this movie was trying to go for here, focusing on the victims so that we care more about them once they start dropping. This was, after all, produced by the guys behind Terrifier, a series that only really came to life when the second film paired its memorable villain up with an equally memorable heroine to fight him. The thing is, Sienna Shaw was a legitimately great character in her own right, and the Keenans are not Sienna Shaw. They're depicted in the first half as a cliché of a suburban family that hates each other, and in the second half as bumbling idiots barring the brief moments when they get sudden, inexplicable bursts of hyper-competence (like, how did Roy know to take that opportunity presented by one of the hidden cameras being busted?). The movie was too dumb for too long to get me to care about its protagonists, which would've been acceptable had this movie gone for the requisite "twenty minutes with jerks" that horror movies usually use to give us the lay of the land before the mayhem starts, but not when its failed attempts at character development take up half the movie.

Where this film came alive was when it focused on the other half of the equation, the killers and the mysterious organization that's responsible for everything. Jeffrey Combs was clearly enjoying himself as Mr. Lockwood, the man who runs the whole operation and is clearly getting into it, at first posing as the hotel's owner to the guests before showing his true colors halfway in. A number of scenes in the first half revolved around Lockwood and his band of killers taking out the hotel's staff, rigging the place up for their murder spree, and facing a number of unforeseen problems that they have to work around, like one employee calling in sick and somebody else showing up in his place, or a drunken guest accidentally breaking one of their cameras. The killers themselves don't get to do much beyond wear cool masks and hack people up, but that is precisely what they do, and it is awesome. Each killer, identified only by a number, has a unique look, with Player 1 being a modern "hoodie" slasher, Player 2 channeling a lot of Art the Clown in his theatrics and body language (fitting, since he's played by David Howard Thornton under the mask), Player 3 being the token woman among them as a hot chick with a sadistic streak and a similar theatricality to 2 (who's shown to be her brother), and Player 4 being a hulking brute reminiscent of Jason Voorhees. The idea of a bunch of killers running around in a competition with each other, like a sick version of American Gladiators, was this film's big twist on the slasher formula, and it served as justification for a bunch of bloody and creative kills, the highlight being when Players 2 and 3 play a game of tic-tac-toe with a knife on some poor sucker's torso. They're winning extra points for style, you see, so simple stabbings just won't do. This movie should've focused on them, with the victims as merely supporting characters and minor antagonists, since the things it teased about the inner workings of this organization were far more interesting than the boring stories of the people they were hunting. The ending teased a whole ton of sequel ideas, as well as Tony Todd as another ringleader for this blood-soaked circus, all ideas that I think would've made a far better movie than the one we got.

The Bottom Line

Stream is a movie that doesn't know what its best qualities are. Instead of focusing on its cool killers and made-for-a-video-game concept, it spent way too long focusing on protagonists who were as dull as dishwater and who I couldn't wait to see meet their ends just to get them out of my face.