Near the beginning of Stream, 11-year Kevin Keenan (Wesley Holloway) gets angry at his father Roy (Charles Edwin Powell) for entering his bedroom while he is live-streaming a game online. “You can’t just pause a stream,” Kevin insists. Still, despite his show of irritation, the young boy is, even here, obliging, loving and good-natured. Roy is far more concerned about his 17-year-old daughter Taylor (Sydney Malakeh) whom he is losing to her own waywardness and delinquency. So Roy’s wife Elaine (Danielle Harris) arranges a weekend getaway for the four of them to The Pines, a hotel in Pennsylvania where they hope to revive the happier times that Taylor had spent with them there when she was younger. What they do not know – although we do from the film’s prologue – is that the hotel’s long-serving manager Linda Spring (Dee Wallace) has just been attacked, captured and viciously murdered by someone on the premises.
Kevin’s opening conversation with his father about streaming is not casual. For the Keenan family and the other residents are about to be locked in and find themselves unwittingly becoming the most dangerous game in a live-streamed gambling event. Under the sociopathic supervision of Mr Lockwood (Jeffrey Combs) in his multi-monitor control room, the hotel’s guests will be hunted down, tortured and slaughtered by four masked killers (Jason Leavy, David Howard Thornton, Liana Pirraglia, Mark Haynes), for the entertainment and profit of online viewers watching a CCTV camera feed. Teaming up with a retired policeman (Tim Reid), Roy is desperate to ensure that his children survive the night.
Writer/director Michael Leavy is part of the team behind Damien Leone‘s Terrifier series, and the connection runs deep. For not only does David Howard Thornton, the man behind the makeup of Terrifier’s Art The Clown, play one of the killers, but Art’s performative mode of murder is also present and correct here, as the “four All Stars” (as Lockwood calls them) constantly pose before the cameras and compete in making their kills as visually creative as possible for their audience.
Indeed there is a strong metacinematic element at play here. The presence of director Leavy on screen (as the hotel’s maintenance man and, significantly, camera installer) and a parade of cameos from horror icons (Lee, Harris, Combs, Reid, Tim Curry, Tony Todd, Bill Moseley, Felissa Rose) all serve to remind us that we are watching a horror film, as does a mid-credits coda actually set in a cinema multiplex (with a poster for Terrifier visible). While this can take the viewer out of the story, it also keeps uncomfortably reminding us that the self-same voyeuristic, sadistic thrills that have the film’s online streamers glued to their screens are also what is entertaining us viewers of Leavy’s film. For, like the Terrifier films, Stream confronts us with our desire to watch – and keep watching – whatever perversely sensational depravities it can contrive. Lockwood and his crew may be vicious, venal purveyors of the most unspeakable, exploitative atrocities, but are they not, after all, only giving us what we want?
Stream is not without its flaws. The dialogue is perfunctory, the characterisation ranges between soapishly flat and cartoonishly broad, and you can feel the narrative being stretched and strained to fit the unnecessarily long duration. Yet this is, in the final analysis, a satire, where a certain broadness is to be expected – and in pointing its accusatory finger at its viewers, and in defying us to pause the stream and stop playing, this mish-mash of elements from Marc Evans’ My Little Eye (2002), Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover (2002), Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005), Nimród Antal’s Vacancy (2007), Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers (2008) and Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms (2023) puts us all in our place as consumers of, well, (horror) streaming services. In the end, we only have ourselves to blame.
strap: Michael Leavy’s satirical slasher turns a hotel’s guests into the most dangerous game to entertain people uncomfortably like us
© Anton Bitel
