If you didn't know the title of the movie coming in, you wouldn't know which DeCoteau movie you were watching. Once again we have the exact same silly tropes: pretty young people go to a secluded wooded location (yes, he shot this at the same exact place as his last six movies) and bad things happen, interspersed with random shirtlessness, the "scary" dream sequences punctuated by a heartbeat in the background, and the obligatory three-minute shower scene, where a hot young guy rubs his abs and chest over and over. (They still haven't figured out: it works better if you use soap.) I was about a third of the way through this movie, more bored than usual, when I realized with horror what the best part of David DeCoteau's films was: the copious amount of male shirtlessness. It's like Skinemax for the gays. Stem Cell takes a decidedly hetero bent, and basically jettisons the only redeeming quality of a DeCoteau movie: rampant homoeroticism. At least Beastly Boyz was bad enough to be mockable; this movie is just boring.

The quick repetitive cuts, the flashes of the same six half-naked boys in the woods, the fact that it's on here! TV...Oh dear, I recognize that smell. Someone's given David DeCoteau another haystack of cash to set fire to, and with it he has given us "Stem Cell". Playing on the fears of stem cell research that through the GW Bush administration severely retarded that research for almost a decade, DeCoteau tells the story of Rita, a writer on the verge of a nervous breakdown. To get away from it all she travels to a remote mountain resort, where she immediately draws the attention of Ben, the resort manager and the son of the local homeopathic healer and New Age crystal enthusiast, and Pierce, a wealthy doctor who operates a free clinic in exchange for donated samples of stem cells for his research. Rita has visions of sexually ambiguous young men who stand around the woods in their underpants for no reason other than sexually ambiguous young men in underpants is the largest line item in any DeCoteau film budget. So the healer figures out that the source of the problem is angry spirits who...can bite people and infect them with mutated stem cells and kill them dead in seconds. Well that certainly satisfies Occam's Razor. While the healers chants to keep the spirits out of her house (and only her house) Ben, Pierce and Rita wander off to collect a sample of stem cells from the human carrier. Because apparently the healer can chant away the spirits using a sample. Why they don't take the healer along as like a mobile spirit force field is not explained. Anyway, Pierce and Ben get bitten (by GHOSTS) and die and Rita rushes back to find the healer dead. Rita emits a piercing scream and...IT'S ALL A DREAM! Specifically, some sort of hallucination of Rita's caused either by paranoid schizophrenia or a car crash she was in a while back. Yes, DeCoteau has reached into the same fetid bag of mold-encrusted tricks from which he drew the ending of "House of Usher" and inflicted upon us my personal most-loathed cinematic cop-out. DeCoteau should be embarrassed to tap this well again just a year after Usher, but it's clear from a review of his career that the man has no shame. The film might possibly have been redeemed by a greater amount of male flesh, but the aforementioned sexually ambiguous undies boys appear mostly in rapid-fire cuts and the two hottest guys, the ones playing Ben and Pierce, remain fully clothed at all times. Don't even bother watching this one on fast forward.