Death Streamer — Death Streamer( Blu Ray)
Death Streamer is tech focused vampire picture regarding a group of blood suckers who stream their killings, but then things go somewhat askew when a group of YouTube vloggers tune into the stream by mistake. The film is the second in Charles Band’s ‘Pulp Noir’ series, which is all about creating edgier, darker and scarier sort of genre entertainment. The film ups both the gore & nudity of a typical Band production, with a more active use of CGI. Here from Full Moon Pictures- is a Blu Ray release of the film.
Death Steamer is Mr Band’s 88th feature-length director's credit. It’s clearly a small-scale release, as it features two locations and a key cast of just five. The film has a relatively short runtime of just one hour and twelve minutes.
After faces stripped of flesh, flowing ‘n’ swirling blood, flames and bats CGI credits. The film opens in what looks like an upmarket fetish club, with folks in fancy leather get-ups & nude female figures standing around in feather-covered masks. We see a pair of hands pick up a pair of VR-like glasses, then get a blood red tinged POV, which lists the number of people watching and subscribed. Through the POV vision, we see a hand summoning a white, flowing-gowned woman ushered to a smaller bar area.
The glasses are removed and we’re introduced to a head vamp- the ragged-haired and stubbly-bearded Arturo Valenor( Sean Ohlman)- who insists/enchants the woman to drink a glass of red liquid, which he later declares is his blood. One thing leads to another, she is stripped, and Arturo's fangs come out, ripping her throat with blood spurting.
Next, we get swooping shots of a large stained glass window building, then some rather cheap credits for an investigative mysteries vlog entitled Church Of Chills. It’s run by/introduced by Alex(Aaron Michael McDaniel), and his two female researchers, brunette Edwina( Emma Massalone) and red-haired Juniper( Kaitlin Moore). The three film, stream, and sleep in the building in tents?!.
Anyway, there is somewhat of a power struggle between the three, with the women wanting to get more credit for their work. We see a few of the trio's vlogs, looking at mysteries/ crimes in a playful manner. While glancing through the web one night, Edwina comes across the Vamps stream…and here I’ll leave my plot detailing.
As mentioned earlier, there is a fair bit of female nudity, as well as gore- this is mostly focused on throat rippings/ blood spurting. The small cast goes from fine to passable, and I must say I enjoyed most of what was on offer here.
The only real criticism I could level at the film is the repeated use of the truly awful credits for the trio's vlog, which gets repeated in full maybe six or seven times over the film. Not sure if this was done to fill in running time, or it’s just purely to show the shift from one lot of characters to the next, but surely there could have been a better way, as by the end of the film, this element was grating.
On the extras side, we get an edition of Band’s Video Zone series- this is focused on Death Streamer ( 25,28). We find out that 7000 actors applied for the roles, so there was a lot of narrowing down to settle on the five leads that were selected. We then get an audition tape of each of the five actors. This is followed by more formal behind-the-scenes footage- it’s a decent enough making of, and if you enjoyed the film, it’s worth a look. Otherwise, we get Death Streamer - Los Angeles Premiere footage, a trailer of the film, and a Full Moon trailer reel.
So Death Streamer is a fairly original take on the whole vampire thing- it has a short/ swift runtime, with gore and nudity. I must say I’ve been impressed with the two films I’ve now seen from Band's Pulp Noir series- taking in the Sci-fi horror/Fantasy of Quadrant, and of course the vampire net horror of the film to hand. I’m very much looking forward to the next Pulp Noir title.