Stir Reviews

Despite its title and prominent featuring of star Traci Lords in its advertising, STIR is not a women-in-prison movie but rather a poorly scripted straight-to-video release about a psychic child and a missing computer disk. Biochemist Joseph Bekins (Daniel Roebuck) returns to the hotel room where he and his wife Kelly (Traci Lords) spent their honeymoon. He completes his work on a medical breakthrough, and is thereafter murdered. Some days later, Kelly and her six-year-old son Matt (Seth Adkins) check into the same hotel room "looking for closure." Joseph's best friend and colleague, Michael Novic (Andrew Heckler) follows soon after. All are under surveillance by Bubba (Tony Todd), a member of the hotel staff. Matt has nightmares in which he is visited by his father and sees the murder. Novic arranges for the boy to visit Dr. Kessler (Karen Black), who will probe the visions. When Matt realizes that the killer he witnessed is Novic, he runs away and ends up with Bubba, who is really an FBI agent. Novic takes Kelly prisoner in an abandoned building and demands the computer disk on which Joseph saved his research. Though she knew nothing about it, Joseph had discovered a cure for AIDS, which Novic plans to sell to the Russian mafia for $20 million. Bubba helps save Kelly, leading to a chase in which Novic is killed in an abandoned building as it is demolished. Matt receives a psychic message from his father, guiding him to discover the disk hidden in his pillow. If there's an audience for movies in which Traci Lords keeps her clothes on and emotes, then STIR is for them. All others will want to give it a wide berth. This is the kind of movie where it takes you an hour to figure out what's going on, by which time you don't care anymore. And once the explanations come, none of them make any sense. How could the FBI be guarding the country's best scientist and let him be murdered right under it's nose? Why would Dr. Bekins be doing research in a hotel room? How could Kelly have no idea what her husband was working on? What's with all the psychic mumbo-jumbo? And what the heck does the title mean? (Violence, profanity.)