The doctor is in(sane) in Stalked by My Doctor.

Written by a bot, directed by a Pomeranian recovering from dental surgery, and starring Eric Roberts (supported by a cast plucked at random from a Target parking lot), Stalked by My Doctor has no reason to exist. Since premiering in 2015, it has spawned 78 sequels, because something must fill the void in our hearts left by the conclusion of Syfy’s Sharknado saga. Recently, when curiosity about this morbid, unrepentantly tacky franchise finally got the better of me, I went to Amazon to see what I was missing.

Before pressing “play,” I invited my wife, Dr. Crankenstein, to share in this special viewing experience. (As previously reported, that was a terrible mistake. I’m now obliged to watch its sequels.) She personally knows a physician who was stalked by a patient, but no patients stalked by doctors. Of this premise, Crankenstein somberly remarked, “That’s not just a violation of the Hippocratic Oath, it’s also a violation of HIPAA.”

Eric Roberts has a less than exemplary bedside manner in Stalked by My Doctor.

The stalker here is a narcissistic cardiothoracic surgeon who peddled pseudoscience on his daytime talk show before entering the Pennsylvania Senate race. Ahem. The stalker here is a narcissistic surgeon whose disastrous dating app encounters all but end in restraining orders. Dr. Albert Beck (the prolific Roberts, who will star in your home movies if the per diem’s generous enough) is barely holding onto his sanity. When romantically rejected, which happens a few times a week, he throws violent tantrums and shouts things like “I am a doctor!”

His workplace boundaries are similarly nonexistent. After operating on Sophie Green (Brianna Joy Chomer), a high school senior whose boyfriend crashed their car while texting, Beck develops a dangerous fixation. He wastes little time kissing her while she’s sedated, among other inappropriate behaviors. Sophie’s mom, Adrienne (Deborah Zoe), immediately picks up on his creepiness. She hits the roof when Albert asks Sophie, now recovered, on a date. Her husband, Jim (Jon Briddell), is not as concerned.

You might postpone your annual physical after watching Stalked by My Doctor.

“Sophie is a very beautiful young woman,” he tells his wife and daughter, sounding vaguely presidential. “Guys will be guys, OK? Occasionally those guys are going to cross the line. It sucks. The world’s awful. She’s just going to have to get used to it.” Jim eventually relents and has a face-to-face with Dr. Beck, who turns on the manipulative charm. “It’s natural for patients to idolize their doctors. We save their lives, we are their heroes. And they make up fantastic scenarios about us, fantasies.”

The real fantasies, of course, are Beck’s—and, befitting a Lifetime film, they’re gleefully depraved. His stalking of Sophie becomes more flagrant, and Jim nonsensically refuses to take action: “Do either of you guys realize who we’re dealing with? He is the chairman of the President’s task force on heart disease! He practically rewrote the book on cardiovascular surgery!” Adrienne and Sophie fruitlessly advocate for reporting him to the licensing board or getting a restraining order. “What, are we going to wait until he rapes her?” Adrienne rages. Indeed, that appears to be Jim’s plan.

Trust me, you don’t want to know what’s happening here.

Where, precisely, the plot goes from here, I’ll leave for you to discover yourself. Some lowlights include a bit of perverted breaking and entering, interference in Sophie’s high school romance, and even sabotaging her mother’s estrogen pills. It’s reminiscent of Delta Burke’s antics in Maternal Instincts, but more grotesque due to its psychosexual elements. Just when you think it can’t get any worse, Beck boasts, “Well, I did take a full semester of gynecological studies, so I am quite skilled.”

I’ll give Stalked by My Doctor some credit for one great visual joke: a patient assaulting a doctor with his own golf club. However, its frenzied denouement, which involves a gross sponge bath, chloroform and allusions to Boxing Helena, is all it really has going for it. One could argue the essential laziness of this misbegotten enterprise is best embodied by Sophie’s boyfriend repeatedly holding his cane in the wrong hand. I might counter with this screencap of a typo in Adrienne’s (illegally accessed) medical record: “lymphnods.”

Lymphnods.

Streaming and DVD availability

Stalked by My Doctor isn’t currently available on DVD, but you can stream it through Amazon Prime or Tubi. Your move, Criterion Collection.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.

… But wait, there’s more!

Watching medical scenes in the presence of Crankenstein is often a chore (who doesn’t want to pause a James Bond film during one of its most suspenseful scenes to hear an impassioned rant about neuroanatomy and the fusiform gyrus?), and Stalked by My Doctor was no exception. Here’s a partial list of her complaints:

  • “Why haven’t they cut off her clothes or done a FAST exam?”
  • “She should have two large-bore IVs by now with lactated Ringer’s open.”
  • “Why is she not wearing a C-collar?”
  • “What’s the head of cards doing there? Where’s trauma?”
  • “She’s having cardiac surgery and isn’t intubated? This is a terrible hospital. No one should go there.”

By the time Dr. Beck touched Sophie’s incision with his bare hands, she almost spontaneously combusted as she exclaimed, “That’s f*cking disgusting!”