Director/Photography – J.M.R. Luna, Screenplay – Andrew Caldwell, Story – Josh Cole & Nicole Sienna, Producers – Josh Cole, J.M.R. Luna & Nicole Sienna, Music – Kenneth Block, Makeup Effects – Caryn Coblio & Matt Corrigan. Production Company – Discovery Bay Films/American Film Productions.
Carson Aune (Cameron Towns), Nicole Sienna (Capri Johnson), Alvaro Orlando (Tommy Kay), Josh Cole (Luke Cohen), Nicholes Cole (Jake), Joseph Buttler (Doctor)
Cameron Towns is dragged away to Las Vegas by three friends so they can throw a wild party for his 21st birthday. Joining them is Capri Johnson, catching a ride to meet up with her boyfriend Jake, much to the chagrin of Luke who previously had a thing with her. At a restroom along the way, the guys pick up a card for a prostitute service that offers do anything. As they settle into the hotel, they decide to call the number on the card. However, after arriving to the brothel, they find that a nasty fate awaits them.
Stripped was a directorial debut for J.M.R. Luna who has elsewhere made short films and worked as a photographer. Luna did make one subsequent film with the better-budgeted crime film Tell (2014). Luna produces the film with Nicole Sienna and Josh Cole, who also conceive the story and play the parts of the two friends who are experiencing tensions over prior involvement along the journey.
Stripped is shot as a Found Footage film, a genre that was at peak popularity at the time. Much of the film consists of following a bunch of young people on a road trip and partying before things start to happen. The Found Footage viewpoint tends to get abandoned near the end, while for some reason there is also edited in a number of clips of Criswell’s opening and end narration from Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959).
Fully half of the film consists of the group of guys clowning around amid seemingly improvised horseplay, crude comments, drinking and general party behaviour. (In seeming embarrassment at the final result, one of the four guys has chosen not to be credited). These sections are akin to imagining Seth Rogen and maybe the crew from This is The End (2013) on some kind of road trip. There is certainly a lively energy to proceedings – on the other hand, I didn’t choose to sit down and watch what is essentially a glorified home movie of somebody’s party weekend and this starts to get tedious the more it drags on.
On the other hand, this does have some legitimacy. This works exactly the same as the lead-in that we get in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) or Hostel (2005) where we join a group of young people on a road trip/seeking a good time before out of the blue things abruptly get weird. It is a well established formula for this type of film – it is just that none of these other films spend over half the film before the horror element kicks in.
However, when the horror element does begin, Stripped kind of fumbles things. There are assorted scenes at the brothel where the guys are led away by the girls and teased and then … something happens – they being killed, attacked and so on. After this, the film then doubles around and has Nicole Sienna, who had earlier exited with her soldier boyfriend, re-enter the scene and go to the brothel in search of them, before being pursued too.
However, in none of this is it exactly clear what is going on or why they are being attacked. Even by the end of the film, nothing is ever clearly spelled out. You can sort of deduce from the fact there is a character called the doctor pursuing them while wearing surgical scrubs that what is going on is probably some type of Organ Harvesting operation – we even see the doctor depositing containers of organs for pick-up.
Trailer here