Cam-Girl Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		2.0
Audio		2.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		1.5

Cam-Girl Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Martin Liebman August 28, 2020

The low budget and disappointingly rote and flat Cam-Girl struggles to build interest or hold any real dramatic value. The film amounts to little more than an extended telephone conversation that unravels its heroine's life in the prism of her growing terror and fear of the unknown, but the picture can't build enough interest in its character or depth to its story to make it matter all that much over the course of its 90-minute runtime. Writer/Director Curt Wiser (who also wrote a novelization titled Box Cutter Killer) does make the most of the limited production opportunities to construct a baseline competent film, but between the technical limitations and the source material's flatline output the film simply can't gain enough traction, aesthetically or dramatically, to hold audience interest, even with its titillating title.

Gessica (Erin Nicole Cline) is a single mother who moonlights as an online nude dancer while working on her Masters degree in what little spare time she has left. She doesn't like the job; even as it's contactless she feels the need to shower after every performance to wash away the shame. Not only does she dance, but she also virtually interacts with her clientele via direct message. She deals with her share of creeps, but when one of them threatens to kill her, she understandably grows concerned. Soon thereafter, she receives a troubling phone call from a man with a creepy voice who knows everything about her: who she is, where she lives, down to the clothes she's wearing and the room she's speaking from. As she attempts to figure out a way to contact help, she's forced to reconnect with the various men she's used and hurt over the years.

Cam-Girl doesn't push too far into the salacious or scandalous as far as Gessica's career in the nude is concerned. Viewers see her perform a little bit, and not with any particularly graphic display of nudity. One of her friends gets topless momentarily, but this is more of a domestic Thriller rather than a film built around sensuality. In fact, Wiser wisely at least tries to build some humanity in his heroine; she's a girl striving to get herself on the straight and narrow, who wants to get away from the business but knows she has the goods to sell while she's working through school and taking care of her child. One of her biggest fears is her mother discovering what she's been doing to make ends meet. Erin Nicole Cline turns in a solid performance in the lead role, unable to overcome a rather bland script but doing well to bring a semblance of life to the character, both a spark in the exotic dancing as well as a feeling for the person away from the camera and, later, tethered to and threatened over the phone. She emotes some genuine emotional responses as her story develops and she's forced to simultaneously revisit her past, fear her present, and realize that her future is suddenly in jeopardy.

The film's stumble is its inability to tighten the narrative and draw its audience into the terror Gessica experiences on the phone. She's a girl who is used to being exposed -- physically but impersonally, an object on a screen rather than real flesh and blood -- who now finds herself exposed in her own realm, outside of the little corner of herself she shares with the world. Unfortunately, the middle stretch moves incredibly slow. Wiser struggle to build, never mind maintain, any real sense of urgency or threat. Yes Gessica is frightened, and she has reason to be, but the audience doesn't have much incentive to really get behind her. Her tormentor's identity is not known until the final minutes, but it's frankly not too difficult to guess. Gessica's conversations with this individual are not particularly compelling, and neither are her secondary calls to the various people with whom she is ordered to reconnect during her time on the line with the mystery man. The main suspect is a handyman, played by Bjorn Jiskoot Jr., whom she calls to fix a broken toilet, a man revealed to be suicidal and depressed due to his inability to land a girlfriend.

Cam-Girl Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Cam-Girl arrives on Blu-ray via a burned BD-R disc and is presented at 1080i within a 1.78:1-frame. This is a very low-grade production made without the benefit of superior cameras and lenses and without Hollywood editing. It's crude in appearance and lacking much production finesse to get the most from the photography. The picture is plagued by frequent aliasing (look at a microwave oven in the 48-minute mark for a particularly severe example) while jagged edges, macroblocking, and banding are all frequent, unwanted guests across the screen, too. Textures are never tight or sharp to even the most modest Blu-ray standards. Skin details, clothes, and various odds and ends around Gessica's apartment struggle to reveal intimacy and intricacy. It's flat and held back by the source and all of the unwanted extracurriculars swarming around most every frame. Colors struggle to keep up, too, lacking the depth, tight contrast, and natural flow found in superior digitally shot, produced, and edited productions. There's enough raw quality to splashy primaries to carry the image, and skin tones are decent enough, but don't expect anything earth-shattering here. All in all, it's a rather poor image, but one must take the production's severe limitations -- as it was shot and as it was transferred to Blu-ray -- into account before judging too harshly.

Cam-Girl Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Cam-Girl's LPCM 2.0 uncompressed soundtrack is, like the video presentation, shaky around the edges but capable at its core. There's sometimes an underlying hiss that only further deteriorates the inadequate innate characteristics, such as tinny dialogue and occasional changes in pitch. These issues are not pervasive but appear in enough quantity to prove bothersome. Dialogue does drive most of the presentation, some of which is heard through a telephone filter, but clarity as it is both on the phone and "in person" as Gessica speaks to her tormentor is generally decent enough. Dialogue does image well enough to the center channel. There's not much vigor to music or enthusiasm in the effort to define various sound effects in the film, either, but everything plays with enough baseline definition to get listeners through the film. Audiophiles will most certainly balk, but for a casual watch the track does its job well enough.

Cam-Girl Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Cam-Girl includes two deleted scenes (1080i): the Original Opening (2:16) and Scene 15 (2:27). No DVD or digital copies are included with purchase. This release does not ship with a slipcover.

Cam-Girl Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Cam-Girl flashes some potential but doesn't flash much of anything else, for those wondering. It's a rote Thriller with limited appeal and even more limited production values, both during the shoot and in post. Erin Nicole Cline isn't at all bad as the lead, and she might have performed even better with a tighter script and with superior editing aiding her work, but as it is her effort is solid under the constraints. This is a watchable low-budget film but it lacks replay value. The Blu-ray is rather weak, too, its video and audio presentations hindered by the source itself. The supplements are limited to a few minutes of deleted scenes. Worth a look for the curiously inclined.