Stoker Hills Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

Stoker Hills Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson March 17, 2022

The found-footage horror film has been one of the most popular subgenres since the late 1990s. Most commentators would put The Blair Witch Project (1999) as its godfather but Spanish auteur Alejandro Amenábar's Tesis, which is about the discovery of a snuff video, came out three years earlier. The subgenre arguably reached its apex with Paranormal Activity (2007) and its first three sequels. While its popularity has waned in recent years, director Benjamin Louis tries to rejuvenate it by adding some new wrinkles to his third feature Stoker Hills (2020). Professor Smith (Tony Todd) is teaching an upper-level film production course and having his students choose a thesis film project. Ryan (David Gridley), his friend Jake (Vince Hill-Bedford), and girlfriend Erica (Steffani Brass) are making a zombie hooker film entitled Streetwalkers. It's Pretty Woman meets The Walking Dead, quips Jake. Prof. Smith doesn't really have rigorous curriculum for his students to examine on the film studies side. He rambles off names of directors that even the casual cinemagoer knows.

Ryan and Jake apparently will share filming duties. They pick up Erica and drive to a hilly side of town. Much of the dialogue in this section is inane but I appreciated Ryan speculating if John Carpenter was high while making Halloween (1978). While Ryan and Jake begin filming atop a hill, Erica pretends that she's a hooker looking to hitch a ride on the road down below. An old gray sedan stops temporarily on the side of the road and then comes back. The driver grabs Erica and pulls her into the car. Ryan and Jake hurry to Ryan's car and chase the sedan to the backwoods. They notice the sedan parked outside a very old building. With their camera rolling, they go inside to search for Erica and find the dead body of a young person. While they freak out, Ryan is too stubborn and heads back in where the hooded perpetrator is waiting for them with a shotgun. The masked figure chases them through the woods and all the way to their school at Stoker Hills College. Erica's kidnapper follows them inside. As Ryan flees to the outside, Jake gets shot and drops the camera.

Time to shoot a movie.

Detectives Bill Stafford (William Lee Scott) and Adams (Eric Etebari) arrive at the college where they uncover the camera and take it back for analysis. A number of young Stoker Hills residents have gone missing recently and they wonder if this is part of the same pattern. When the detectives investigate the derelict building, they find a machine labeled "Property of Stoker Hills Medical Center," which they promptly drive to. They interview a Dr. Jonathan Brooks (John Beasley), who confirms that it belongs to the hospital. Dr. Brooks has a general idea about why someone would need to use this machine but is murky about details. After perusing his patient files, however, he believes he knows who stole it and confides that a John Doe patient recently needed a kidney transplant. Dr. Brooks was literally conducting a guinea pig experiment and inserted a pig's kidney into this unidentified patient. Dr. Brooks's attractive daughter, Danni (Tyler Clark), is in the same film class as Ryan, Jake, and Erica, but she's also gone missing. Has the Stoker Hills captor got her, too?

One half of Stoker Hills features handheld and Steadicam shots. This is the most frustrating part of the film because it basically features Ryan and Jake running and panicking as they try to get away from the perpetrator. The camera frequently goes black and then comes back "on" again. It's one of the most unoriginal aspects of the movie. The other half is a standard police procedural. Stafford and Adams are clichéd detectives because they imitate private eyes in film noirs too much. Stoker Hills not only recycles some of its plot from but also owes a lot to Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000), which is a superior production.

Stoker Hills Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Screen Media Films' recent release of Stoker Hills comes on this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-25. In an interview with Monkeys Fighting Robots, cinematographer John Orphan explains that he shot entire picture on the RED Weapon 6K RAW, a large camera with big lenses. In another interview he did with postPerspective, he elaborated that he filmed it in 6K at 3:1 compression with 2K proxies and shot using anamorphic lenses with 1.3x squeeze ratio. Stoker Hills was shot in a multi-aspect ratio. All of the subjective shots taken by Jake and Ryan are framed in 1.78:1 (see Screenshot #s 1-3, 6, 10-11, 13, 15, and 19). When the movie settles into a standard narrative with a primarily omniscient POV, the framing switches to approximately 2.40:1 (see Screenshot #s 4-5, 7-9, 12, 14, 16-18, and 20). A majority of filming takes place at night and it shows in my captures. Orphan and his camera crew opted to use blue, teal, and green hues (see frame grab #s 5-9, 11-13). There are no compressional artifacts. Screen Media has encoded the feature at an average video bitrate of 26173 kbps. My video score is 4.25/5.00.

Screen Media has provided a dozen scene selections for the 91-minute movie.

Stoker Hills Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Screen Media has supplied a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 Surround (3822 kbps, 24-bit) and an LPCM 2.0 Stereo (2304 kbps, 24-bit). Delivery/spoken words are clear and crisp. Gunshots, footsteps, and metal clanking sounds are effectively dispersed on the 5.1 track. Composer Roc Chen crafted a musical score that coalesces well with the eerie sound design.

Screen Media delivers optional English SDH, which the viewer can activate either through the Menu "Setup" or via remote.

Stoker Hills Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There are absolutely no extras to be found on this disc.

Stoker Hills Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Stoker Hills admirably adds some new touches into the fold of found-footage films but overall, it's an uninspired effort. It features ample gore and a dose of torture porn that should please genre aficionados. I like David Gridley (The Unhealer) and hope to see him in some better movies. Screen Media Films delivers a very good HD transfer and uncompressed 5.1 mix but zero extras. Stoker Hills is currently going for around $25 so I would give it a RENTAL FIRST.