Valerie on the Stairs tells the tale of a novelist who discovers there are fates worse than literary anonymity in this sexually-charged tale of terror.
Based on a short story by Clive Barker, Valerie on the Stairs is probably a great read, but on film, as an episode in the MoH series, it just doesn't work. It starts off all right, but quickly becomes boring and quite predictable and stays like that until the very end which just felt very dull and made for an overall bad outcome. Garris tries hard, but even if the man wants well, it just doesn't cut it from a horror point of view. I've read a bunch of interviews with the man and while he seems like a great guy, his very films have never appealed to me and I'm sorry to say, but Valerie on the Stairs was no exception.
In Valerie on the Stairs we get to follow Rob Hanisee, a struggling writer trying to get published. He moves in at a place called Highberger House that is some kind of hostel for unpublished writers, where they can live for free until they're published. Not long after the guy has moved in and started to write his masterpiece, he hears crying and sounds in the walls and it doesn't take long before a girl appears before him on the stairs outside his room, begging for his help. Can you guess her name? Anyway, she at first seems to be held captive by the Beast Othakai who comes and takes her every time she appears before Rob, but then she seem to be Othakai's life partner as well. Naturally, Rob needs to find out who or what Valerie is and try to free her from the walls in the house that she's trapped behind.
 
Rob has to deal with the strange tenants in the house with one of them that he befriends and who's a guy that doesn't seem to write too much, but instead just likes to chit chat and smoke pot. Or at least that's the first impression you get, but the tenants of Highberger House are not really what they seem. Well, that's all I'm gonna say and I gotta say that it sounds somewhat exciting, but the fact is that it was really not. Like I said before, the episode starts off all right, but it soon starts to drag a little too much and the overall pacing is pretty much dreadful. Even though things do happen in the film, it somewhat feels like it just keeps on dragging and that made it a little hard trying to stay completely focused on it while it was making its way through.
Simply put, it goes from potentially interesting to bad and when at the end, you just know it's not gonna end in a satisfying way, and it doesn't either. Clare Grant who plays Valerie bears a slight resemblance to Sissy Spacek and that was pretty much all that I found to be cool with this episode, and I guess that pretty much says it all. I gotta admit that the very premise of the episode was interesting, but it quickly fell to to pieces as soon as the little mystery that it had to it started to unravel.
The acting was not bad, but I'm not gonna go as far as saying that it was good either, because while it may've been decent enough, the actors that were in the film didn't really stand out in any way. The lead character Rob, played by Tyron Leitso, felt pretty stale and didn't do much for the movie; he wasn't really that likable and it was hard rooting for him, even though he was supposed to be "the hero." Christopher Lloyd you'll recognize right away for the fact that he seems to be his usual self that we've all seen before. Tony Todd is of course the evil one and I guess he's all right for the part, but his character talks way too much nonsense which makes him less scary, or should I say not the least bit scary.
Valerie on the Stairs didn't feel like a horror film, but instead like a very slow moving drama that had a horror theme to it. It's too bad that Garris didn't succeed this time around and I was not a fan of his last episode that was The V Word either. It had a good start, but that was follow by a sleepy and uninteresting middle part which led to a pretty poor unsatisfying ending. It might all work great on paper, but on film it just didn't cut it.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE: Valerie on the Stairs
MOVIE YEAR: 2006
DIRECTOR: Mick Garris
WRITING CREDITS: Mick Garris, Clive Barker
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Clare Grant, Tyron Leitso, Tony Todd
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 60 min
RATING: 2/10
Masters of Horror (S02E08): Valerie on the Stairs Website/IMDB Click here
Masters of Horror (S02E08): Valerie on the Stairs Trailer Click here
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