In short: Deadstream (2022)

Warning: there are spoilers forthcoming!

Deeply unlikable Internet “influencer” and insufferable man-child Shawn Ruddy (Joseph Winter) whose shtick it is to livestream himself fighting his fears while whining a lot aims for a comeback after some past unpleasantness we’ll only learn details about much later. Clearly, the way back into the adulation of the public he believes he deserves is by streaming a night in a haunted house. While whining and fake-shuddering his way through the house, he acquires an unwanted sidekick in the form of a fan called Chrissy who suddenly pops up (Melanie Stone) in a way that’ll only convince an influencer nothing untoward is going on (that’s not a spoiler, surely), lets himself be goaded into an ill-advised ritual, and eventually proceeds to enrage the already rather nasty local main ghost into quite a bit of Evil Dead 2 like horror comedy business, though with a lower body count.

I didn’t enjoy Vanessa and Joseph Winter’s horror comedy quite as much as the rest of the Internet apparently did. Largely, that’s on account of my growing dislike for the “all influencers are horrible and fake” set-up I’ve seen too many horror movies use in the last half decade or so. It’s a bit too pat and too self-congratulatory a set-up, usually lacking nuance, and doesn’t get better by the number of films that simply repeat it. This also leads to films whose first half consists of deeply punchable asshats with one character trait doing little of interest, a problem we encounter here as well.

The first half of Deadstream is admittedly somewhat better paced than these things often are, but it still forces us to spend a lot of time with a single idiot doing little of interest. Shawn isn’t exactly a grower, either, or charming in his idiocy like Evil Dead’s Ash, so even once the film gets going in his second half, I can’t say I was ever on his side instead of the ghosts’.

To be fair, the tour de force parts of the film are typically fun enough to shift the focus from how little I enjoy spending time with its main character, and the pacing of the slightly weird horror comedy set pieces becomes downright great. Stone’s gleefully over the top full body performance is also quite the thing, providing the force Shawn fights with an appropriately extreme personality. There’s also some mirroring between her and Shawn’s motivation going on, but this mostly gets drowned out by the loveable gooey nonsense.

Still, I found Deadstream’s first half or so weak enough to drag the whole film down considerably.