The Lurker

I like Scout Taylor-Compton I think she is a good actress but I mean she is quite clearly not young enough to play a high school student and doesnt even look close, to the point where it's impossible to look past that and actually even try review any other part of this movie, I cant believe she would even agree to the part.

It justs bad beyond belief and for that it deserves nothing more than 1 star.

Scout Taylor was born in 1989...means she is 30 years old in 2019 . Did you really really have to choose a 30 year old girl to play a high school girl? Who belives that anyway? It's cool you put an 80s sound and desaturate the colors and give some sense of nostalgy...we say "oh what a cool movie", then we see the 30 year old girl who is probably using anti-aging treatment prentending to be a high school girl. Her parents look younger than her.

And with her hair style and her wrinkles...I just couldn't belive the main character. It was just distrupting my concentration.

I saw the bad reviews about the casting but thought I could ignore it if it had enough of an "80's slasher" feel to it because none of those actors were teenagers either but it really was too hard to get past. I actually burst out laughing when Taylor-Compton referred to herself as "underage" to a man who looked like her husband...if not, son.

But again, I could have forgave it if the plot was substantial but it wasn't. It was uneventful and by-the-numbers. I guess if you're a big Horror fan it might be worth a watch if you have some time to kill. But I wouldn't spend money on it.

During the production of a play at a high school in the Chicago area, theater students and members of the faculty are preyed upon by a mysterious lurker in a bird's beak plague mask.

"The Lurker" (2019) was described by producers as "an ode to 80's slashers," which is true, but it has more in common with "Scream" from the mid-90s, walking the balance beam between serious slasher and semi-parody. Remember Henry Winkler's weird principal? You'll get the same curiously hammy performances with the drama club teacher and the father at the party house. You also get the unnecessarily mean-spirited characters with a few exceptions, like the interesting long-haired janitor.

Scout is, of course, a highlight as the protagonist. She was soon-to-turn 30 during shooting and barely acceptable as a 17-18 years-old student, but this isn't exactly uncommon in filmmaking seeing as how Roddy McDowall played a high school student when he was 36 in "Lord, Love a Duck." Petite Kali Skatchke is another standout in the feminine department as Emma. There are a couple of other notables, but the director unfortunately didn't know how to shoot women (no pun intended) in the manner of, say, the original "Friday the 13th" or "Slumber Party Massacre II."

The story is a whodunnit and the revelation at the end is good; proficient writing on that front. The gore's well-done as well, for those who care. Unfortunately, there are some technical issues, like questionable dubbing and editing, which offers a kind of off-kilter viewing experience and smacks of inept or low-rent filmmaking.

Despite my criticisms, it's entertaining enough to make it worth checking out for fans of the genre.

The movie is short 'n' sweet at 1 hour, 14 minutes. It was shot in Chicago.

GRADE: C-/C.

This movie does not even deserve a review, because it's on the level of a high school project, where all of the "actors" and "actresses" were cast off the street and randomly given roles, some of them deciding to ham it up like an absurd comedy. The lead actress looks to be the age of the mother of the classmates, there's an entire generation gap between her and the rest of the students. The acting is tone deaf, amateurish, emotionally devoid, and on the verge of character breaking. Scenes just suddenly lurch forward with every cut, with no regard to tone, setting, or logic. The dialogue is either banal, on the nose, pointless, or senseless (in the case where the lead refers to a clearly normal human killer as "something") To top it off, the audio is quickly slapped together, with several places where ambient audio is simply missing, as characters are speaking with no sound, sentences are cut off between scenes a couple times, some voices are omnipresent, while sometimes a person's voice audio will be louder than the others. It's movies like these that IMDB should have a 0 rating, because this isn't a legitimate feature film, it's a group project where even the people involved will be embarrassed to see again.