RELEASED TO TV IN 2017 and written & directed by Sheldon Wilson, "Stickman" chronicles events when a 7 year-old girl is accused of murdering her mother & sister and put in a mental institution. She's finally released ten years later and finds residence at a halfway house for girls. Unfortunately, the evil spirit that slew her kin is on the loose again and threatens all the girls at her new residence. A few of them travel back to the hospital to find a way to put an end to the creature's reign of terror.
There's a lot of good in this flick: The filmmaking is proficient for a TV-budgeted movie; the locations are decent, which include the asylum, the transitional home, and points in between, like the town and the woods (there are several cool shots of a truss bridge in the dark); it's nice to have a black protagonist for a change (Hayley Law); the five other girls at the halfway house are all regular lasses with no stereotypical "hottie," although a few of them COULD have played that role (e.g. Sara Garcia, Sarah Fisher, Zoé De Grand Maison, etc.).
In addition, the film successfully creates a spooky ambiance here and there, e.g. in the woods near the psyche facility; and the demon is pretty effective for a CGI monster, coming across as a meshing of the demon from "Scarecrow" (2013), the aliens in "Signs" (2002) and maybe Freddy Krueger (i.e. the claws).
Unfortunately, I didn't buy the premise behind the creature, which came across as half-baked gobbledygook; the poem that unleashes the demon reads like it was written by a 13 year-old and the climatic explanation didn't resolve the overall ill-conceived impression. This naturally hinders the movie from being engaging; it limits the thrust of events and therefore suspense.
Note to emerging filmmakers: Work the kinks out of your premise BEFORE making the movie. The director, Sheldon Wilson, needs to work on his scriptwriting skills because the movies he writes tend to be problematic story-wise ("The Hollow," "The Night Before Halloween," "Neverknock" and this one) while his movies written by others can be quite good for TV-budgeted flicks ("Mothman," "Red, Werewolf Hunter" and the aforementioned "Scarecrow," which is excellent).
Lastly, the final scene is predictably lame. Still, there's enough good here to make "Stickman" worthwhile for those who appreciate these kinds of flicks.
THE FILM RUNS about 89 minutes. There's no info on where it was shot, but since this is a Canadian production it might've been somewhere outside Toronto.
GRADE: C
