The Killjoy Collection

Directors: Craig Ross Jr, Tammi Sutton, John Lechango
Starring: Trent Haaga, Angel Vargas, Victoria De Mare
Find it: Amazon

A funny thing happened as I worked my way through 88 Films' The Killjoy Collection - starting out with curiosity, turning to disappointment and then after filtering through various shades of boredom and resentment, I actually started to like the 99p franchise. I'd even go so far as to say that I was genuinely saddened when I finished the set, having no more left to see. Say, (producer) Charles Band, if you could hurry up with a fifth installment, I'd be highly appreciative.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy The Killjoy Collection, but is that a case of hate-watching or hipster irony at work? Honestly, I hope not. Sure, its first two entries are dire (some worse than others, eh Deliverance From Evil), but even that's preferable to the mass produced homogeneous nonsense (a hipster statement if ever there was one) cluttering cinemas everywhere with their 15 certificates and found footage bullshit. Killjoy, at least, tries. Its fourth entry is more original and interesting than most slasher movies could ever dare to be, slathered with with heaps of what it is that makes Full Moon great. That's the same reason I enjoy Jason Goes to Hell, Freddy's Dead, I Know Who Killed Me and The Wicker Man remake - I'll take an interesting failure over bland 'will this do?' coasting always and forever.

Also, it gives us Punchy the Hobo Clown, which I'll take over any of Pinhead's cenobites, anytime. The box set comes loaded with an appropriate amount of special features; that is to say, barely any. After all, this sort of thing is best in small doses. With two films per disc, it's a sparse release, but one that looks good on your shelf nevertheless. I'll probably never watch any of them again, but I'll be keeping hold of it, just, y'know, in case.

Anyhow, without further ado, the reviews. The Killjoy digest, if you will. Follow the links for the words:

Killjoy - In which I liken Killjoy to Oz and The Wire.
Killjoy 2: Deliverance From Evil - Bleeding clowns.
Killjoy 3 - Killjoy: with production values!
Killjoy Goes to Hell - The courtroom drama one.

Adding up that time I spent watching Killjoy and writing about Killjoy, that's at least ten hours this week I've spent thinking about Killjoy. I... I honestly don't know how to feel about that.

Killjoy 3

Director: John Lechago (2010)
Starring: Trent Haaga, Victoria De Mare, Al Burke
Find it: IMDB

It's Killjoy - but with production values! "Here," says producer Charles Band to the franchise, "buy yourself something nice," handing them more than a tenner for this sequel. "You have to put white people in this one, though." And so Killjoy returns, transformed (from whatever it was before) into your more traditional, slick American slasher film. His victims this time are a student house full of kids who look like either Ashton Kutcher or Anna Kendrick, plus obligatory black friend.

This time, however, Killjoy has brought buddies. You get not one but four killer clowns for your buck, in the shape of Batty Boop (De Mare), Punchy the Hobo Clown (Burke) and Freakshow the Mime (Tai Chan Ngo), who look pretty great and have fairly amusing names. Frustrated by not having anyone to kill, the clowns decide to bring the mountain to Mohammed by sending them a magic mirror, kidnapping the kids while they watch a Puppetmaster sequel.

Killjoy has always had more of a Freddy Krueger vibe to him than a Pennywise one, and this three-quel finally goes all the way with its nightmare-like fantasy sequences and wisecracking villain. There's even a sequence in which one of the kids' bodies lies, struggling on the floor while his mind is murdered in a dream world. Unfortunately, Haaga is more Jim Carrey as The Mask than Robert Englund as Krueger, coming across more as annoying than scary. Even Freddy's Dead era Englund knew when to dial it back. Trent Haaga has no such restraint, fart gags and all. His buddies fare better - mostly because two of them know when to keep their mouth shut and Batty Boo isn't in it enough to irritate quite so much. The mime, meanwhile, is legitimately terrifying. If only Killjoy himself had been so silent.

Also silent.

But if you're too dumb to either eat or spit out a literal apple

You deserve to get fuckin' basted.

The increased budget and cleaner visuals make Killjoy 3 the most palatable yet. Visually inventive and fitfully funny (some of the jokes actually hit their target), it makes for quick and easy viewing. It's just a shame that, in this circus, the clown with his name on the poster is the worst one. It's the equivalent of an acquaintance you kind of hate bringing friends to a party who you actually like and get on with. Get Punchy the Hobo Clown and Freakshow the Mime their own spin-off, Band!

Killjoy 2: Deliverance from Evil

Director: Tammi Sutton (2002)
Starring: Trent Haaga, Charles Austin, Debbie Rochon
Find it: IMDB

The only reason this sequel exists is because people, for some good reason, are scared of clowns. While the clown is a perfectly legitimate horror villain, a lot of shit has been excused in the name of Coulropohobia. Horror's most famous horror clown, for example, is all anyone remembers about the otherwise mediocre IT adaptation, hiding in storm drains, offering out balloons to his victims-to-be. Make no mistake, Pennywise is a fantastic creation, and IT is perfectly servicable in places, but if it weren't for its clown, no-one even would remember its existence. Struggling to get your crummy slasher movie off've the ground? Stick a clown in it.

With that in mind, Killjoy 2 is a thing that actually exists, totally because of artistic merit and not simply because clowns are popular whether they're any good or not (usually the bleeding latter). Trent Haaga takes on the greasepaint and gloves this time, stepping into the mighty big shoes of Angel Vargas. While Haaga has found cult acclaim as the killer klown of the piece, his is a much less entertaining performance than the one Vargas gives. Even worse, there appears to be less of it, with most of our time spent with a gang of cops and their community service detainees (IMDb lists them as 'juvenile delinquents', but they look at least thirty years apiece, so I'm not perpetuating that nonsense) taking off to the county (hence the tenuous 'deliverance' in the title) where they run into killer clown Killjoy.

Just a guess, but this sequel is one you probably won't hear mentioned when Women in Horror Month rolls around. Saddled with a bad cast and incomprehensible story, director Tammi Sutton struggles to elevate the material but winds up producing something even worse than the film which preceded it. Killjoy himself looks horrible, like a really bad Buffy the Vampire Slayer villain (crossed with something Mighty Boosh), remarkable only for a decent face melting scene and a slight increase in the onscreen action. At least it has this though, which almost redeems the whole thing.

With one song, the £6.99 I spent on this box set is justified. The rest of it, I could have done without.

Killjoy

Director: Craig Ross Jr. (2000)
Starring: Angel Vargas, Vera Yell, Lee Marks
Find it: IMDB

After years of seeing Killjoy bothering the shelves of my local Poundland and 99p Store outlets, I finally chanced my arm and picked the bastard up, in the form of HMV's exclusive (although you can less-than-exclusively buy it on Amazon) 4 film set containing the movie and its sequel. With the set costing me £6.99, that equates to roughly £1.75 per film. That's a bargain by anyone's maths, right? Right? Um, guys?

Watching the title credits roll, there's that familiar feeling of watching a no-budget nightmare unfold before your very eyes. There's the dodgy music, the even dodgier, apparently thrown-together credits, and the very dodgiest grime of a camera lens that you could probably buy on eBay these days for less than a tenner. Everything about Killjoy screams 'we have no money'. That said, early episodes of The Wire and Oz also happen to have the same sheen of penniless-ness about them, so you shouldn't disregard these things entirely. I should have guessed from the DVD case that looks like a 90s era video game. And, to be fair to director Craig Ross Jr. and the folks at Full Moon, Killjoy looks pretty great. If the entirety of their budget went on that Killjoy get-up, one has to commend them for being wise with their pennies.

Everything else makes me think I was overcharged for this £6.99 box set. While there's nothing out-and-out terrible here, we do spend the entirety of our time following around a gang of, well, gangbangers who make the criminals of The Wire look like upstanding members of the community by comparison (although one of them was Idris Elba,so maybe that's a tad unfair). When they murder a poor nerd obsessed with a girlfriend, so demon clown Killjoy (a superb Vargas) comes to claim revenge on his behalf. Alas, with all the money spent on the make-up, this vengeance amounts to little more than an ice cream van, warehouse, some cardboard boxes and a bit of green CGI. There's death for everyone, but none that you'll actually remember. Somehow, though, it managed not just one but three sequels. If the law of diminishing returns applies here, poor Killjoy is fucked.

While not as bad as its 99 pence reputation might suggest, it's hard to recommend Killjoy for much beyond an entertaining bad guy performance and its entirely black cast (wasted on such nonsense). If nothing else, it's proof that non-white people can have awful horror movies too.

Next: Killjoy 2.

Stitches

Director: Conor McMahon (2012)
Starring: Ross Noble, Tommy Knight, Gemma Leah-Devereux
Find it: IMDB

Those who suffer from caulrophobia but love horror movies could do worse than Conor McMahon's Stitches - after all, whoever could be scared of cuddly Ross Noble? The stand-up comedian and serial QI gobshite tries his hand at horror movie villainy in this, an odd Irish cross between A Nightmare on Elm Street, IT and The Inbetweeners.

While attending a friend's birthday party, a gang of bastardly children accidentally murder  sweary clown-for-hire Richard 'Stitches' Grindle (Noble). Years later, at Tom's (Knight) sixteenth birthday party, Stitches is resurrected and out for revenge. Beyond its strange choice in lead actor, Stitches is an old-school slasher movie in the mold of A Nightmare on Elm Street (if you thought Freddy's one-liners were bad, just you wait until you hear one of these beauties) or Maniac Cop. His victims may be younger than we're used to, but Stitches pulls no punches in his bloody vengeance. Heads are kicked off, faces impaled, bollocks pulled off, intestines unravelled and that's not even the half of it. There's a shocking amount of gore in Stitches - very much earning the film its 18 rating.

Unfortunately, like everything else that's not James Bond, Sinister or Paranormal Activity 4, Stitches was utterly shafted upon its UK cinema release. I found myself huddled up in a completely empty screen at a shitty cinema in the middle of nowhere at 9:20 at night, so sparse were showings of the film. That's a shame, because Stitches is one of the few horror movies of 2012 that I wasn't disappointed by. Mind, I am a sucker for seeing horrible children get their deserving heads kicked off by zombie clowns.

This is not going to be everyone's cup of tea. Black as the comedy might be, the film is played entirely for laughs. The over the top gore makes it impossible to take seriously. Unless you have, maybe, very severe fear of clowns, Stitches isn't remotely scary. Like Noble's stand-up routines and panel show rants, the film does ramble on a bit towards the end, the youths are exceptionally horrible and the acting a bit duff. Noble is fantastic as Stitches, but alas, the hook-handed shadow of Psychoville's Mister Jelly looms large over the film. Were it not for the existence of Reece Shearsmith's fabulous creation, Stitches would be a great creation. As it is, he's merely very good.

A comedy horror with guts, gusto and plenty of grue, Stitches truly is a noble effort.