Directors – Ronnie Khalil, Monroe Mann & Jorge Valdes-Iga, Screenplay – Bob Madia, Monroe Mann & Ronnie Khalil, Producers – Monroe Mann & Ronnie Khalil, Photography – Jorge Valdes-Iga, Music – Bruce Chianese, Makeup Effects – Eric Anderson & Anthony Jones, Art Direction – David C. Miller & Thomas Starkey. Production Company – Clownfish Horror/Loco Dawn Films, LLC/The Maine Studios.
Cast
Monroe Mann (Monroe Bachman), Ronnie Khalil (Ronnie), Kayle Blogna (Nicole), Crystal Arnette (Hilary Bachman), Kate Costello (Lori), Justin Brown (Lamont Jackson), Polly Humphreys (Deedee), Michael Bernstein (Verrill), Jason Martin (Boat Warden), Arthur S. Brown (Dale)
Plot
A group of friends travel up to the small town of Encomium, Maine. The nerdish Ronnie is in search of the home where Stephen King lives but the locals are curt and unfriendly whenever he asks about this. As they settle into their cabin, someone begins killing members of the group.
The title You Can’t Kill Stephen King certainly makes this a film that grabs your attention. It is like Killing Bono (2011) where the placing of a celebrity’s name on the title, even if the film is not about them, at the very least makes you do a double-take and want to see what the film is about. Certainly, if You Can’t Kill Stephen King had gone out without any other generic slasher movie title, it is likely anybody would have paid attention to it. It is a sensationalistic foot in the door to getting people’s attention. Not to mention one that ends up being a big cheat in terms of delivery – nothing in the film comes anywhere near uttering or approximating the title claim and no efforts are made to kill King. For that matter, we don’t even get to visit his home as the characters set out to do.
Without the sensational title, You Can’t Kill Stephen King boils down to being nothing more than a routine Slasher Film. It follows the basic tropes of a group isolated at a cabin as assorted of the group are being killed off. It is certainly a film steeped in Stephen King homages – a boat named Christine, characters named Bachman, assorted comparisons to King stories, a shelf of King books in the house, not to mention a cook at the diner that bears a resemblance to King. Although just as many of the references are to King films as opposed to books – Ronnie Khalil with his finger going ‘redrum’, two of the girls in a spoof of the bathroom scene from The Shining (1980) and in the film’s most amusing touch Justin Brown as a Pennywise from It (1990) with naked butt.
Characters on a road trip in search of Stephen King – (l to r) (front seat) Monroe Mann and Justin Brown; (middle seat) Kayle Blogna and Kate Costello
The film promptly runs up against characters that grate on the nerves. The characters are all introduced at the start in a series of freeze-frame bios – a notion that was cute and novel at the time of Feast (2006) but by this point seems try-hard and cynical. Moreover, each of the characters are identified by a single trait – the socially maladroit and pervy nerd, the Iraq War vet with PTSD issues, the well-stacked and self-absorbed bimbo – that become over-stressed and repeated as nauseum. The token African-American character (Justin Brown) talks in a nonsensically inane babble. The two male leads incidentally are also played by the two of the directors/writers and the producers of the film. There is a mild amount of gore but nothing in the film hits any sophisticated note.
In reality, Stephen King lives in Bangor, Maine, a city with a population of 30,000, as opposed to the film’s claim that he lives in a rural nowhere town. It does leave you curious as to what King’s involvement in the film must have been.
