The Eric Roberts Collection: Story of Eva (dir by Tom Woodbeck)

Posted on April 9, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Jakey, Jakey, big mistakey,” the bad guy says at one point during 2015’s Story of Eva and if that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about this film, I don’t know what to tell you.

Eva (Nicole Rio) is the mother of teenage Amber (Chelsea London Lloyd). After Amber is murdered by a serial killer who also works as a human trafficker, Eva decides to get revenge. First, however, she has to train herself to not only inflict pain but to also handle it. She finds Amber’s stash and starts smoking it. She wears a ball gag. She whips herself. She learns how to handle pain. She uses Amber’s college fund to buy a membership at the gym and takes boxing lessons. And she builds her own little dungeon. Whenever Eva captures a criminal, she turns into Evil Eva and is even played by a different actress, Shawn Craig. Eva is one of those vigilantes who can’t punish an evil-doer without delivering an endless monologue. The script is talky in the way that scripts written by first-timers determined to prove their cleverness often are.

“No child should ever suffer!” Eva — in “good” form — announces before then adding, “What kind of God would allow that?” Thunder rumbles in the background and it’s not for the first or the only time in the movie as Eva views herself as having become a vengeful God. I have to admit that I appreciated the fact that the film was so shamelessly overwrought and overdone. Everything about the the move is over-the-top and yet, oddly, it’s still rather dull. Some of it is that fact that we live in a post-Hostel world. Torture chambers just don’t carry the same jolt that they once did.

Eric Roberts plays a detective who is investigating all of the murders. He is named Detective Wood. His partner (Rico Ross) is named Detective Grind and the fact that there was no one named Detective Bump seems like a missed opportunity. Roberts appears in a handful of scenes and brings some welcome wit to the role.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

October Hacks: Sorority House Massacre (dir by Carol Frank)

Posted on October 4, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1986 film, Sorority House Massacre, tells the story of two people who share a psychic bond.

Beth (Angela O’Neill) is a college student who can’t remember anything about her childhood and who was raised by her aunt. After her aunt dies, Beth joins a sorority and moves into their house. Almost from the minute that she arrives, Beth starts to have disturbing visions and dreams of a man with a knife and blood dripping from the ceiling. With most of the members of the sorority leaving for the Memorial Day weekend, Beth ends up staying with Linda (Wendy Martel), Sara (Pamela Ross), and Tracy (Nicole Rio). The other girls want to have a fun weekend but instead, they find themselves dealing with Beth and her glum attitude. Linda and Sara sincerely want to help. Tracy is a bit annoyed with the whole thing and I don’t blame her.

Meanwhile, a man named Bobby (John C. Russell) is a patient at a mental asylum. He’s been a patient ever since he was arrested for murdering almost his entire family. Bobby has been in a rage for the past few days, beating his head on the walls and attacking anyone who enters the room. Just as Beth finds herself having visions of Bobby, Bobby has visions of Beth. When Bobby does finally manage to escape from the hospital, the first thing he does is break into a hardware store and steal a hunting knife. (He uses the knife to take care of the owner of the store.) Then he steals a car and promptly drives off towards Los Angeles and the sorority house.

Sorority House Massacre was produced by Roger Corman and, just as he did with Slumber Party Massacre, he hired a woman to both direct and write the film. As such, while Sorority House Massacre has all of the usual scenes of sorority girls taking showers, trying on clothes, and running around in states of undress, it’s still never as misogynistic as some other slasher films. Beth, Sara, Linda, and Tracy all come across as being fully-rounded characters and the viewer doesn’t want anything bad to happen to any of them. If anything, in this film, it’s the various boyfriends who are portrayed as being somewhat disposable and easily victimized. Certainly, not a single one of the guys proves to be particularly useful once Bobby shows up at the sorority house and starts his massacre.

Why is Bobby fixated on the sorority house and Beth in particular? Director Carol Frank does a good job of portraying the killer’s mental state, with a good deal of the film’s scenes being shot from his own point of view. (Perhaps the scariest moments are not the ones featuring blood and knives but the ones in which the killer moves from location to location and we see, through his point of view, just how relentless he is.) Frank also takes us straight into Beth’s mind, showing us her vivid hallucinations as they happen and the end result is that Sorority House Massacre often has an unexpectedly surreal feel to it. It’s a low-budget slasher film that plays out like a filmed nightmare and it sticks with you, even after the end credits.