Movie Review: Steelmanville Road (2017)

This prequel to Bad Ben doesn’t work nearly as well as the original did, and it’s not the story. There wasn’t much story to the original either, so that’s clearly not the problem.

One of the problems is this movie is greatly missing the onscreen presence of series creator Nigel Bach, whose line delivery brought to life a lot of the humor of the original film. This one isn’t nearly as funny, and the few laughs I did have felt unintentional. But regardless, the cast here is pretty bad. Many of the actors I thought were atrocious.

But perhaps the bigger problem as a whole was how much less subtle this movie is in its spectral encounters.

There are actually a few visual effects, or almost more optical effects. And given this movie’s lack of budget, these come across as super cheesy and don’t look very good. The original, in avoiding these due to budget, was far more effective.

I’m not about to give up on the series just yet, but this was a disappointing entry.

Rating: 2/10