Don (Phil Brooks, AKA: professional wrestler C.M. Punk) moves to the suburbs and buys an old house with a sordid history. (It was formerly a house of ill repute.) His task is to renovate the place before his pregnant wife (Trieste Kelly Dunn) joins him in their new home. While sprucing up the joint, Don encounters a sexy young girl (Sarah Brooks), who naturally seduces him. When she refuses to go away, it threatens Don’s already shaky marriage.
Girl on the Third Floor is an interesting amalgam of a haunted house film and a psycho stalker chick movie. (Otherwise known as a “Man Gets in Trouble by Thinking with His Dick flick”.) Director Travis Stevens steals bits from haunted house classics such as The Changeling (a ball bounces ominously down a flight of stairs), House (there’s a misshapen, cackling zombie woman), and The Amityville Horror (lots of mysterious black goop on the wall). While it all doesn’t quite gel as a whole, he proves to be technically proficient when it comes to creating atmosphere and mood in such a claustrophobic environment.
The game performance by Phil Brooks holds it all together. The scenes of him screaming, performing emergency self-surgery, and being covered in all manner of glop, slime, and grossness play like his audition tape for the role of Ash in the next Evil Dead reboot (which I would probably pay to see, given the fact that Brooks is so entertaining in this flick). The other Brooks in the cast, Sarah, does a great job as the seemingly innocent seductress that is more deadly than she initially appears. She has a Rachel Nichols quality about her that is winning, even if she isn’t all that menacing once all the chips are down.
Brooks, Phil, that is, does a remarkable job considering it’s a one man show throughout much of the movie. So much so that the scenes without him pale in comparison. The third act is weak and predictable, and that’s probably what held me back from giving it a full *** rating. However, Brooks shows enough promise here to make me want to check out whatever he does next.
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