After being released, a reformed serial killer moves into his family's ancestral estate and is haunted by his past -- both the living and the dead.
Rock, Paper, Scissors is a psychological thriller directed by Tom Holland (director of the original 1988 Child's Play), written by Kerry Fleming and Victor Miller, and with music by Harry Manfredini (Miller and Manfredini both involved with the original 1980 Friday the 13th). The cast includes a number of horror actors, such Ari Lehman (who played the first Jason Vorhees in Friday the 13th), and John Dugan (Grandpa Sawyer from the original 1974 version of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre).
With this quality of cast and crew involved, it seemed odd that it took nearly two years to be released after its world premiere in October of 2017 (under the name Rock, Paper, Dead), and instead of a wide theatrical release, being relegated to a straight to DVD/VOD release. One explanation could be from the scripts heavy borrowing from the New York Best Seller Whispers by Dean Koontz (which had already been adapted to film in 1990 and re-released on DVD in 2012), and similarities in tone and direction to Psycho II (which Tom Holland wrote the screenplay for).
In an interesting direction, the film begins where most horrors end, with the antagonist caught in the act, treating the audience to a prologue in the form of a gritty and twisted murder scene, before the obligatory court case once caught, where our antagonist is deemed legally insane. It turns the usual premise on its head, proposing a "rehabilitated" serial killer in the form of Peter (portrayed by Luke Macfarlane.
Much like the recent iteration of DC's Joker, our main character is paradoxically vying for the position of both protagonist and antagonist at the same time. Struggling with mental illness and his dark past, he experiences a variety of events that could be classed as anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or could be something more sinister.
The film tackles a lot of dark content, including a lot of implied rape, sexual abuse, and paedophilia. There is an apparent attempt to make our main character sympathetic, and at times it succeeds in doing so. Macfarlane does a great job with his role, portraying this rather tortured soul, but his performance is limited by the script which fails to create a compelling third act from this intriguing premise. In reality, the entire story feels weak, with si much emphasis on our main character's past, that the present timeline is near non-existent.
Visually, the camerawork is great and cinematography cannot be faulted. The opening scenes specifically perfectly captures that warped and twisted personality of our "Doll Maker" serial killer with a green colour palette that brings a sense of grubbiness in a stained environment. The gore in the film is rather minimal but well-executed. It forges such a clear slatter gore atmosphere that would fit in the Saw or Hostel franchises without question. It was so competently done, that it leaves the remainder of the film feeling more of a drama than a horror.
With the number of variables and plot elements that Fleming and Miller had involved in the screenplay, 86 minutes was not long enough to do it justice. There was an intriguing backstory, that came at the expense of the main story, which teittered around with little sense of narrative direction. Rock, Paper, Scissors does well to keep things hidden as long as possible, but it ends in an absolute shambles that creates far more questions than are satisfactorily answered in the film.