Latex Movie Review: The Deaths of Ian Stone

Hockey player Ian Stone ( Mike Vogel ) comes close to hitting the winning goal for his team when the clock stops on the score board causing him to unknowingly take the shot two seconds after the game ended. Dejected by losing a game by a technicality Ian tells his girlfriend Jenny ( Christina Cole ) that he has had this strange feeling all day that bad luck was following him. After dropping Jenny off at her parents house Ian begins to drive home when he spots a body lying in the middle of the road. He attempts to call 911 when the body becomes animated, turning into some sort of creature that drags Ian out of his car and into the path of an oncoming train. Moments after Ian is killed he wakes up in an office where he is employed. Jenny is now just one of his co-workers, and he has another girlfriend, Medea ( Jamie Murray ), who lives with him in his loft apartment. That night while they are in bed together Ian remembers that he was on the hokey team in college, but after looking in the yearbook does not see himself in the team picture. Puzzles as to why he has memories of a life that did not exist he returns to work the next day when he is confronted by an old man who warns him that he is being hunted by creatures who want to kill him, and the second he dies he will wake up living a different life. He is also warned that this has already happened many times before, and he has already lived several lives. Eventually the creatures do show up and kill Ian, and he wakes up driving a cab with Jenny as his passenger. Ian is killed a couple of more times but gradually begins to retain his memories of past lives as well as the warnings the old man he keeps meeting gives him and the tip that whenever the creatures are about to kill him he will notice nearby clocks stopping.

That is as much of the plot I can give away without spoiling the movie. The Deaths of Ian Stone sounds like another cyberpunk film similar to movies like The Matrix, but it is not. While it borrows heavily from the cyberpunk genre, I can tell you that it is all about supernatural creatures and not about some computer generated other-world. This does bring up one problem I have with the plot. It is eventually explained why Ian is jumping from life to life, but it does not explain how Jenny and other characters are also jumping into different lives, nor how the rest of the world does not notice. A computer generated world would explain all of this, but once again, this is well established that the events in this movie are taking place in the real world. There are a few other plot points that do not make any sense which I will not mention here due to them being spoilers. But I suspect screenwriter Brendan Hood came up with the plot patching together elements from other films rather than having a single source or idea he drew from. It seems as if the producers came up with the budget first for creating cool phantom creature effects and then wrote the movie around those effects. On the one hand, there have been several cyberpunk films that have handled this same theme far better, but on the other hand The Deaths of Ian Stone is well above the quality you would expect from what amounts to a direct to video sci-fi movie. While it never actually frightens you it does hold your attention from start to finish, and does achieve a level of cyberpunk creepiness.

THE SCENE:
Once again I will try my best not to spoil the film for those of you who want to watch it from start to finish. Jamie Murray's character Medea becomes a torturer in one of Ian's lives. While Ian is retrained to a hospital gurney with straps and a metal head brace Medea enters the room wearing what I assume is a red vinyl catsuit. ( you never really her from the waist down, but that is what the outfit appears to be. ) This happens at 58 minutes into the movie and she is in this outfit for a good eight minutes. She is very briefly seen wearing the outfit again at 1 hour 14 minutes. Jamie Murray wears the only other fetishy outfit in the movie, black pants and t-shirt but with black leather boots and a reddish brown leather jacket beginning at 27 minutes, and can be seen wearing the same outfit at 40 minutes, 45 minutes, 49 minutes and 55 minutes.