Strawberry Flavored Plastic fuses some of the intrigue of a classic serial killer movie with the aesthetics of a found footage film. Although it’s not the most exciting of 2019’s releases, it certainly shows promise for writer/director Colin Bemis.

Documentarians Errol Morgan (Nicholas Urda) and Ellis Archer (Andres Montejo) set out trying to get to the root of several unsolved murders in the town of Peekskill, New York. Early in their pursuit, they encounter Noel Rose (Aidan Bristow), a man who claims to be a recovering drug addict and sociopath. Noel also claims he has just be released from prison after serving a good portion of his sentence from another slaying and then proceeds to use the claims about his past to take credit for the Peekskill murders. Despite their moral hang-ups, the two filmmakers see Noel as just the right opportunity to make a mark with their documentary. Errol and Ellis give Noel his own video camera and a bucket of memory cards before putting him back out in the wild to live his life. The hitch is that they soon find out Noel isn’t exactly who he has described himself to be. 

Despite the clear ambition behind it, Strawberry Flavored Plastic definitely feels like an early project for Bemis and his colleagues. Specifically, the film is a bit too much of a riff on Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer to really stand on its own. In fact, Strawberry Flavored Plastic flies right over the finer notes of Henry and lands closer to a low-budget feature called Hunting Humans. Like Bemis’s film, Hunting Humans plays at the intersection of charming serial killer tropes and found footage motifs; both also seem to lack the strong, clear narrative drive that would make a film of this sort interesting to watch. For a movie that is supposed to have us enthralled with each member of its small cast, the scripted dialogue often got in their way—many words felt out of place, either in the mouths of the actors or in the structure of the given sentence being spoken, that line delivery often fell flat. And, once you cut out much of the solipsistic monologuing of the characters, there’s actually not much left behind to digest. I’m not necessarily one to make direct suggestions, but Strawberry Flavored Plastic may have fared better if it was built around a more carefully tooled script or had been scaled down to a short. 

Those who worked on Strawberry Flavored Plastic are able to construct the technical aspects of a film just fine, but it seems like they still have some growth to do in terms of developing a thoroughly enjoyable full-length feature. For a production that was clearly pulled together on a micro-budget, I applaud the young filmmakers for even have the gusto to pull together something nearly 2 hours long. Although their skills need time to mature, Strawberry Flavored Plastic is a perfectly fine starting point in what will surely be long careers for Bemis and his team in the film industry.