| A gang (of 3 men) harass and eventually kill a nerdy student, not realising he’s been keeping a creepy doll, lots of tealight candles, and dabbling in a bit of voodoo. Then one year later a psychopathic clown turns up, complete with an ice-cream van and murderous intentions. You might think a giggling, supernatural children’s entertainer spouting unfunny one-liners wouldn’t be remotely scary. And you’d be right. He lures people into his ice-cream van, and they suddenly find themselves in an old warehouse room, like a very cheap and disappointing version of Narnia. There’s hardly any blood on show and no real gore, no jump scares and no atmospheric tension. The music used throughout is the kind of background soft pop you’d hear on inexpensive commercials. A few times the camera angles and lighting are interesting (a close up of the nerdy student’s dead face with car headlights behind him; a partially-lit door in a darkened apartment) but they’re few and far between. The cast is small. Some victims are brought back as half-hearted zombies. There’s one girl whose only role seems to be to soap up her bosoms in a lingering shower scene. And a mysterious homeless man pops up at key points to spell out the story to us. “Listen! I got a plan. We gotta split up!” someone says, without irony. If you switched TV channels and started watching this part way through, you might mistake it for one of the Scary Movie horror spoofs. That is until Killjoy appears and you realise he’s too intensely irritating to be a comedy character. It’s a bad film, with lots of problems to point out. But you might need to drink an awful lot before you want to laugh more than you want to shout. 0.5/5 |  |
