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.