So, so late. Sorry.

This time around we’re looking at another of Steven R. Monroe‘s horror directing efforts for Tubi – Teardrop, written by Spyder Dobrofsky. Much like Harland Manor, this stars a bunch of working class actors out there doing the thing.

Tubi summarizes the plot for us like this: The nightmare begins when a teacher takes his students on a field trip to an obscure ghost town that may be haunted.

Again, much like Harland Manor, I found this to be an effectively ghost story, but with a plot that doesn’t entirely add up. Stuff just happens because that’s the story, without a lot of internal logic. They found an excellent location to shoot for production value, and they made a workhorse fillm – the kind of film you throw on when you just want something easily digestable. I wouldn’t make it a priority, but it doesn’t belong on the bottom of the pile by any means. 3/5 Skulls.

This is where the spoilers hit, so if you want to watch it first, go do that. I’ve got a plot summary to kick out.

Chris, a high school teacher and struggling writer, and Rebecca, an unspecified member of the school faculty, are chaperoning a field trip to the tiny old west town of Teardrop with three students from the creative writing club: Josie, the vain ‘hot girl’ who flirts inappropriately with Chris; Teala, the perfect student trying to get into the most selective colleges; and Ross, the aspiring but questionably skilled rapper who flirts with anything apparently female. Why are there two faculty on the trip with only three students? What high school has a creative writing club, and how are these the students in it? Are we buying these late twenty-somethings as teenagers? These may seem like important questions, but I guess not. Just accept that these are the facts. The town is sparsely populated with creepy people who dress kinda old tyme, and one of them tells the schoolies about the Hanging Judge, who was known for hanging a lot of people, hence the name. Well, the Hanging Judge had a daughter who didn’t cry and he couldn’t handle that, so he smothered the child with a pillow, blamed it on his wife/baby-mama, and hung her while she was pregnant with their second child. Turns out that child survived, though, and Chris is the long lost descendent of the Hanging Judge. Shit goes wonky. Chris starts to see things that aren’t there and ends up smothering Josie with a pillow. The ghosts of all the hanging victims of Teardrop team up to kill Ross, Teala, and Rebecca for the crime of being alive in the town of Teardrop. The ghost of the innkeeper says some mumbojumbo about how “it always happens like this” and “I never make it much past ten” before blowing hisown brains out with a pistol, all for reasons that are a mystery to me. There’s a game of hangman that says either “Finch and Flash” or “Filch and Flash” for some reason. And then the ghosts of the Hanging Judge’s wife and daughter make Chris, who seems now possessed by the ghost of the Hanging Judge, hang himself. The end.

The direction on display here from Monroe is, one more time much like Harland Manor, really solid. He develops tension well and finds creative ways to shoot and edit to create an effective atmosphere. Was I jumping out of my boots? No. But I can recognize skill when I see it. The big issue here for me is the script, which is just so full of holes. This is Dobrofsky‘s first feature, and it shows signs of promise but doesn’t quite get there for me. I say this often, but I wonder if this wasn’t once a much longer script that lost a lot in the editing process to get it down to 90 minutes. Things seem like they could make sense with a little more detail, but they seem to just happen as it is.

Next time we hit one more Steven R. Monroe Tubi Original – Unborn!