Tag Archives: Danielle Harris

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Time to Check Out – For Good!

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Stream

by George Wolf

Violence and cameos. It’s not a bad business model – just ask Deadpool & Wolverine.

Stream offers a steady stream of both, inside a rollicking blend of familiar tropes and beloved icons that should make Gen X horror fans positively giddy .

Linda Spring (the legendary Dee Wallace) owns a cozy hotel in the Pennsylvania countryside, and it’s finally ready for the big reopening. Perfect timing, because Roy and Elaine Keenan (Charles Edwin Powell, scream queen Danielle Harris) need a vacation. So they round up their gaming-obsessed son (Wesley Holloway) and boundary-testing daughter (Sydney Malakeh) and head for the hills.

But not long after checking in with Mr. Lockwood (Re-Animator‘s Jeffrey Combs), the Keenan family finds themselves in danger of checking out permanently. Four masked murderers are gleefully hunting the hotel guests, and competing for creative kill points in a sadistic competition that’s being streamed for wagering.

Director and co-writer Michael Leavy (a producer on Terrifier 2) keeps the body count high and the welcome practical effects in focus, with obvious nods to The Purge, Cabin in the Woods and more as the hotel guest list reveals more fan favorites from horror and beyond.

There’s Tony Todd, Bill Moseley and Felissa Rose! Plus, Tim Reid (WKRP), Terry Kiser (Weekend at Bernie‘s), Mark Holton (Francis from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure) and more to keep you pointing at the screen like DiCaprio in that one meme.

None of this is very original or profound, and the two-hour running time would definitely benefit from a more firm editing hand. But if you’d gladly trade all that for more cameos and bloody, nostalgic fun, Stream delivers a satisfying getaway.

New In Theaters

OK Google, Start Apocalypse

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Project Dorothy

by Christie Robb

When small-time crooks James (Tim DeZarn, the Cabin in the Woods) and Blake (Adam Budron, Special Ops: Lioness) need a place to hunker down and evade the police, they pick the absolute worst location. They’ve stolen a laptop with a Wi-Fi dongle that enables internet access. And they are hiding out in an abandoned research facility where a rogue AI named Dorothy has been lying dormant since killing off its human overlords.

All Dorothy needs to enact its plan for world domination is, you guessed it, access to the internet.

In Project Dorothy, director George Henry Horton (co-writing with with Ryan Scaringe) tries to make the most out of an abandoned factory and a handful of actors. The use of security camera footage and the saccharinely menacing voice of Danielle Harris (genre staple and the voice behind Nickelodeon classic The Wild Thornberrys Debbie Thornberry) as Dorothy is surprisingly effective in conveying the oppressive sense of constant surveillance.  And the use of forklifts as Dorothy’s robotic enforcers is amusing.

But many of the shots seem repetitive and there is not enough in the script to make the viewer care much about the fate of the world or the two men. It’s like the set up for a Doctor Who episode without the lived-in charming characters and would have, perhaps, made a better short film than a feature.

But, hey, forklift henchmen are fun.