Stitches (2012)

It’s nearly impossible to create a good horror movie about clowns. I don’t know why, or have a solution or anything – it just seemed like the best way to open a review of Stitches.

Director: Conor McMahon

Starring: Ross Noble, Tommy Knight

IMDb

This is a “funny” “horror” “film” about a clown cult that brings dead clowns back to life to “finish their jokes” by killing everyone who wronged them in life. I’m guessing that is a common occurrence. After all, with so many clowns dying in the middle of their acts, it’s good they have a failsafe to fall back on! Also, why did I put all those words in quotation marks in that first sentence? If you want to find out, READ TO THE END OF THE REVIEW … or not, because I probably will forget about it and not answer it there either.

We start off this masterpiece of cinema with a clown having sex with his girlfriend. Apparently this is a mating ritual that ends up in tiny clown-faced eggs being formed. But since the egg was on the table already when the scene started, I guess I’m just full of shit.

The clown, whose name is Stitches, goes to a party full of British kids, who hate his act. Well, there’s your problem – the British don’t want clowns; they want dry humor full of people who talk so fast you can’t understand a goddamn word they’re saying! Please direct your hate mail to me at ... ha ha ha, no; don't bother. Only self-important jackasses send hate mail. Instead, just continue on with your life and don't let stuff you read on the Internet fill you with that much hatred.

Apparently the clown is so bad the kids actually just figure out ways to kill him – what a bunch of little psychopaths. Their parents aren’t watching or anything, either; I guess they just think 'clown' is code for 'babysitter.' It doesn't even matter when their kid ends up watching the clown get stabbed in the eye and then gets clown blood all over his face.

Just pretend it's Nickelodeon slime.

There’s a lifetime of therapy for you!

The clown dies, and so the main kid goes to the graveyard later on to see his grave. Again, so glad the parents were watching him this whole time! And that they properly lock their doors at night. Fortunately he doesn’t get killed, molested or kidnapped – he just comes across an underground cult of clowns in the graveyard talking about resurrecting clowns from the dead through making eggs with clown faces painted on them. Didn’t we do this in Sunday school around Easter time? Why is it being brought back in a horror film?

"How dare you interrupt the Insane Clown Posse rehearsal sessions?!"

We then go forward six years, because that’s not a bizarre or awkward time jump at all. Now everyone is in high school, where they all act like complete douchebags. I guess maybe this is supposed to be because of the clown thing, but I just think it’s because these kids are shitheads. They do stupid things like have daydreams in class about the clown ripping out a kid’s testicles and tying them to a balloon.

Good for you, you fit that scene into a movie. You spent money putting that scene, from your fucked up head, into the real world for people to see. What do you have to say for yourselves?!

… Oh. Nothing. Because you can’t hear me – because this is just text on a blog that I’m writing, which the makers of the film will probably not see.

I see how it is. What am I doing with my life?

So I guess they have a party at the main character’s house. The clown comes back to life because this one kid leaves his window open with the invitation on his bed while he’s starting to jerk off to a picture of a girl’s face on Facebook. The invitation then lands on the exact spot of the grave where Stitches the clown was buried – thus bringing him back to life and telling him exactly where to go.

… That’s so stupid I would have to take an entire other review to explain. Most of the review would be taken up with me just asking WHY? Over and over like that. No, what I wanna know is – WHY WAS THAT KID ABOUT TO JERK OFF TO A GIRL’S FACE?

Ohhhhhhh yeah, some girl's face in a picture!

Not even a particularly sexy face or anything, just a generic Facebook selfie. Yearbook photos are more erotic! Jesus, this is fucked.

We get the actual party scenes, and they’re pretty tiresome. Some banging on about liking girls and all sorts of boring drama. Something interesting finally happens when this bully shows up in a clown outfit and scares the shit out of the main kid, who thinks it’s Stitches, back from the grave! The main kid runs out of the house and hides in a treehouse, while the bully gloats about it with his stupid girlfriend. Uh, buddy, I think you’re the asshole in this scenario – you’re the one dressed up like a poor imitation of Pennywise the Clown and crashing a party which likely does not give two shits about your petty vendetta.

Luckily, the real zombie clown comes back and kills the bully. But not before showing off his true magic prowess and pulling a rabbit out of the kid's mouth:

Look at that poor thing, it looks traumatized!

But whatever, who gives a shit about THAT when we have so much more to talk about? I mean, personally I always would rather have boring, puked-up drama about the main wuss trying to get that one chick to talk to him more, rather than another death scene. Which is why there’s so much of that I guess. We also find out an amazing fact about clowns – being dead gives them several special abilities, like making bad puns and removing their nose and having it roll around independently to “sniff out” the scene.

I'm sure that comes in handy a lot when you're trying to sniff out which pair of pants you left your week-old Philly Cheesesteak Sandwich from the grocery store in and don't feel like digging through your laundry. Otherwise it's probably useless.

Anyway, so one of the other guys tries to get with this chick who used to be fat but now isn’t. He accidentally spills his drink all over the bully girl, who then throws a beer can at him and knocks him to the ground. The chick formerly identified as fat then comes over and flirts with him. Bully girl says this line as she’s leaving: “How perfect, a dick and a cunt together.”

Uh, HOW is that a joke? What, because she … named two things they have and two things MEANT to fit together by the laws of nature???

Oh well, it’s still funnier than the other scene going on – where the clown kills some fat kid in a closet, then spends a looooong time disemboweling him and putting his brains in a bowl to eat. So what does the clown say while eating the brains?

“Now that’s food for thought!”

Shakespearean art for sure - look at the drama on that face as he's about to eat the brains! Also, Hannibal Lector is suing you as we speak.

What? No! No, no, no. You can’t just do that! Why would he say that when there’s nobody around? What the fuck’s the point?! I’m seriously just astounded. Hannibal Lector would be so ashamed.

Oh, and I forgot to mention “Dying in Your Arms Tonight” was playing the entire scene, too – while the fat kid literally died in the clown’s arms. I’m sure that’s what Cutting Crew had in mind when they originally wrote the song; a fucking zombie clown eating brains. Fucking genius, really.

After that, the clown kills the bully girl with an umbrella and makes her head explode somehow. I could probably go on and make some jokes about that, but I’m just mystified by what happens immediately after: the clown thrusts his pelvis out, does a little jig and says, “Taken from behind!” while standing over her corpse. Frankly, after watching it, I felt like my head had been blown up with an umbrella.

That pretty much owns the movie. A fuckin’ dead clown doing a pelvic thrust after exploding a girl’s head and then making a dumb joke afterward. And again – HOW is it funny when nobody’s around to hear you make the joke? Isn’t that the whole point? To have people, oh I dunno, HEAR THE FUCKING JOKES?!

I can’t really remember what happens in the rest of this movie. I do remember something about the clown killing some kid by blowing his head up like a balloon:

But really nothing else. They end up figuring out that, to kill the clown, they have to destroy the egg with his face on it. Apparently dead clowns are sort of like mystical genies or something. After some pretty boring slapstick that can’t in any way top the “Taken from behind!” scene, the egg is crushed and the clown evaporates. The main characters go back to their boring lives, with one hell of a story to explain to the dead kids’ parents, and then we get an epilogue where we see another clown piecing the dead clown’s broken egg back together:

What a sad and pathetic life you must have to try and bring back a clown who these kids already killed twice. I mean Jesus fuckin Christ you'd have to be crazy. Literally crazy! They say the definition of insanity 

What? Why? What the fuck was so important about Stitches? Did that one dead clown really merit bringing back to life AGAIN?! Are those kids really just the scourge of all clowndom? Am I really still talking about this silly movie?

No. No I am not. I am not saying another word about Stitches, which is a movie I recommend if IT and Killer Klowns from Outer Space weren’t kitsch enough for you. Now I’m really not talking any more about it. Bye!

Images copyright of their original owners, I own none of them.

REVIEW: Kill Katie Malone (2010)

This movie is bad. Whatever kind of bad you're thinking, this is worse. This one’s going to hurt – I mean, it’s going to hurt a lot. Like, getting your wisdom teeth pulled-levels of hurt. I mean...I…ugh. I just…eugh. I can’t even….this movie’s tagline is “Never Buy a Demon on the Internet.” Never Buy a Demon on the Internet…that’s so dumb I can barely even form a coherent sentence around it! Ugh. Kill Katie Malone, people.

Director: Carlos Ramos Jr.

Starring: Dean Cain, apparently, and nobody else according to the DVD box! I'll go with that!

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1523485/

“I teach Shakespeare! I don’t frighten easily!”

-A Shakespeare Teacher

The movie begins at some house where a girl is about to star in Hellraiser 17 and a half, with the window open and the wind blowing and everything as she’s standing over a black box. Her father comes in and shouts at her to get out of this script while she still can, but she says no, being an edgy and rebellious teen. Unfortunately their acting is so over the top that it causes flour to jump up and make the girl’s face all white. Then the father gets blown out of the room and the door closes, and that’s the scene!

Was that confusing enough just reading it? Well, that’s because it made about as much sense watching it, too. You know what, I miss the Hellraiser movies.

Then we see a Halloween party with some prissy douchebag, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer knock-off and a Nick Cannon wannabe walking around exchanging putrid dialogue. The prissy douchebag, whose name is Jim, goes to talk to some girl he likes, but apparently he’s such a terrible catch that she prefers the Insane Clown Posse’s head groupie over him:

Pre-etty low standards there, girl.

Then back in their dorm room, Jim is searching eBay and comes across a listing for a ghost. Thinking it’s really an awesome idea, he begs and pleads his two friends to pitch in 40 dollars so they can buy the ghost. Because they’re also dumb as a box of rocks, they give in with a minimal amount of prodding. Seriously, am I supposed to care at all? A bunch of 30 year old “college kids” (ha ha…right…) have seriously got nothing else to do except sit around on eBay and pool their money to buy “haunted ghost boxes”? Whatever happened to the days when kids did drugs and drank alcohol all the time? I miss those days.

"Hurrr durrr let's look up ghosts on the internet and buy them off ebay, we're so cool!"

Also, are we supposed to believe that the father from the beginning lost his daughter and then said, “Hmm, I don’t have any use for this evil demonic black box…better sell it on eBay”? Seriously?

So they get the box and there’s nothing in it but a little locket thing. They for some reason make wishes for things like roses and money, and for some random-ass reason, the box grants them and leaves these things on their bed while they’re not there. Why? I have no idea…I just want to get this over with.

Jim and his Nick Cannon lookalike roommate, Dixie, just goof around, I guess, until later that night when they’re sleeping and then they start to hear loud noises as an invisible force knocks stuff around their room. They hide in the bathroom like idiots for a few minutes only to come out and find something in Gaelic written on the wall, so of course they think someone broke into the room and did it – even though they were in there the whole time. I guess you could argue that they’re just making sense the only way they can out of something that cannot be explained, but I think that’s giving the movie too much credit. They’re just incredulously large dipshits.

And hey, random Asian girl locked in her room with a computer who has nothing else to do but look up historical information and foreign language translations for the main character!

That’s not stereotypical or racist at all!

The Buffy-like girl, Ginger, also has some strange stuff happen in her room, like books flying around. Even though she never leaves the room or turns away and can CLEARLY SEE that it’s some invisible force knocking her stuff around, she thinks it was Jim who did it, even though CLEARLY he was not there at all, nor was ANYONE. Was this girl dropped on her head as a child? Or is she just blind? Of course she’s angry at Jim for it, even though there is no conceivable way it could have been him, and she storms off angrily when he tries to talk to her.

Of course the next day, she’s completely over it and acts like it never happened, probably because the writer of the movie can’t concentrate on anything for longer than three seconds and literally just forgot the character was supposed to be mad. Stunning. We find out that Dixie apparently plagiarized something for a paper he did and is about to get expelled. He says he wishes she wouldn’t talk, so then we cut to a later scene where the teacher is walking all alone at night…gee, I can’t even imagine what’s going to happen in this scene

That's the face people made when they advance-screened the film for the first time.

She hears some noises and shouts, “I teach Shakespeare! I don’t frighten easily!” What? What does that mean? Is she related to that Mo guy from The Stuff? They both sure know how to spout the most non-sequitur, nonsensical crap ever…oh well, anyway, she bites off her own tongue in a really over the top fit of “acting,” and the scene fades out before any gore can be shown. Wonderful.

The next day, after some very poor shots of the backs of everyone’s heads that go on for way too long, we see Jim and Ginger sharing a cement-flavored energy bar together when Ginger’s roommate Misty comes up wearing a sweater of Ginger’s. Ginger bitchily chastises her for wearing the sweater and then gets mad at Jim when he makes a light crack at Misty, because THAT makes a lot of sense…ugh. Well, at least no kittens were harmed in the making of THIS roommate-themed scene.

Then outside, a big crowd is formed as the body of the Shakespeare teacher is found. Wait, so she’s just being found NOW, after at least one class is already done for the day? What, did the entire school just walk past the bloody tongueless body on the ground and shrug at it until someone put it into context for them that it was a dead body? Or are dead, bloody tongueless bodies just the norm at this school? Frankly neither one would surprise me. I also love how when they’re rolling out the body in a bodybag after Dixie tells them the teacher is dead, Ginger says “Is that the teacher?” No, you idiot…it’s the other dead body they found at school this morning! Gosh.

Just your average day at Kill Katie Malone school.

After that we see Misty messing up the sweater, and since the ghost is now an advocate of sweater protection, it pushes a big paper cutting thing all the way across the desk and forces her arm onto it. I love how Misty is obviously in distress, yet all the teacher does is scream at her to stop disrupting the class. It’s not exactly a special needs class, you jackass – she’s PRETTY OBVIOUSLY in trouble and most likely wouldn’t just randomly cause a scene if she wasn’t. Though, with the way people in this movie act, I don’t blame the teacher for thinking his students are mentally incapable retards.

She loses her arm via ghost paper cutter machine AAAAND we still don’t get to see any gore. Would it kill the filmmakers to at least try to entertain us? If your writers can’t write, at least throw some silly gore or tits in to give us SOMETHING to enjoy!

So she gets her arm cut off by a paper cutter because Ginger "wished" that she wouldn't mess up the sweater...wow...and I can't get over this with the teacher. "HOW DARE YOU GET MORTALLY WOUNDED BY AN EVIL GHOST! YOU'RE SO INCONSIDERATE!" This is stupid! I feel stupid for watching it!

After that we see Jim going over to that hot chick’s house where her dumbass Insane Clown Posse boyfriend pulls him aside in the kitchen and loudly and physically threatens him for the horrible crime of possibly thinking about making a move on his girlfriend…even though he hasn’t actually done anything. Also, wouldn’t the girls in the other room hear him shouting at Jim and pushing him up against the cabinets? Of course not, this is Kill Katie Malone! We can’t have anything make sense!

Then he goes home and this happens:

What?! WHAT?! No, you can't be serious with that! That's barely even a finished death scene; go back and finish the editing process and make it look better! And besides that, what's the reason behind this anyway? Most of the deaths so far have been connected to what a character "wishes" or something, but as the film goes on, they just seem to get more and more random. Did Jim really think in his head "Gee, I really wish that douchebag would meet a little ghost girl on the side of the road who would scream at him so loud that he would evaporate into thin air"? I'm sorry; I just...don't think that's very plausible! Mostly because he has the imagination of a goldfish. THINK, WRITERS! THINK!

The next day, the hot chick Jim has a crush on calls him to ask where her boyfriend is. He says he doesn’t know. He then says, “Hey, I was wondering…” and she cuts him off right there without even letting him finish and says “No, Jim…maybe if I was single.” Of course he was about to ask her on a date, which would have given her the right to be a bitch to him, as she is taken, but…he didn’t even finish the sentence! He could have been asking to borrow a textbook for class for all she knew! God, okay, whatever, she gets blown up randomly by the ghost for no reason:

Are they even trying with these deaths anymore? You might as well just jump-cut them off screen and then have one of the characters say they just ceased to exist. That’s how little effort you’re putting into this shit now!

So at the hospital, Ginger and Dixie are there because of Ginger’s roommate, who they say “cut off her own arm.” Uh, so that’s what they’re saying happened? Not “the paper cutter mysteriously, on its own, slid across a desk and then cut her arm off in front of an entire class,” but “she cut her own arm off”? IT HAPPENED IN FRONT OF A BUNCH OF PEOPLE. HOW DID EVERYONE GET THAT WRONG? WHY IS NO ONE INVESTIGATING IT? WHY IS THIS MOVIE SO STUPID? Gaaaaaggggghhhhhhh….I’m seriously reaching my breaking point, guys. It’s almost here. I’m just going to wrap up this shit fast and get it over with.

After that Jim comes up with the brilliant plan to “set the ghost free.” He opens the box, says she’s free and then throws it in the garbage, and that’s it. Riveting, Kill Katie Malone…riveting. This apparently gives him the license to date Ginger spontaneously for no real reason. They go back to have sex in her room, but he gets jump scared by a ghost for like a second, and she tells him to get out.

Seriously, movie?! Seriously, that's the ghost scare you're going for now? Get the hell out of here.

The next day she’s over it again, because again, her character is so poorly written that she can't even stay consistent in a two-minute interval between scenes. She and Dixie team up for the climax until the ghost freezes some stairs Dixie has his hand on and he rips it off and gets all bloodied up and stuff. This somehow renders him into a blubbering crying mess for the whole rest of the movie (until he gets turned into a smear of red paint on the floor a few scenes later, never to be mourned or even mentioned again). I know yanking your hand off ice like that hurts, but...God, the way this guy is going on, you'd think he just got his hand amputated or something! Man up, you pussy!

Meanwhile Jim is locked in his room by the ghost and gets a call from a mysterious girl who says the only way to get rid of the ghost is by buying it in an online auction apparently - stupid, but hey, it's almost over; bear with me.

WILL HE GET THE EBAY BID ON TIME?!? My heart is racing!

Oh no Dixie, don't cry! Your mortal wounds will have such a heart-rending effect on us all that I DON'T THINK WE'LL BE ABLE TO TAKE IT! NOOOOOO!

Yeah, grown men crying and eBay bids, truly Kill Katie Malone knows how to bring the thrills to life. Is the ghost just going to stop whatever she’s doing when the girl wins the bid and go “Oh, sorry, my bad. I’m leaving now!” I guess so. Because that’s what happens! What an obedient ghost!

There’s another scene after that, but screw it, I don’t even care. As far as I’m concerned this movie is over.

I seriously have not hated humanity after watching a movie like this in a long goddamn time. If there was ever proof of Satan’s existence and involvement on Earth, this movie is it. Do I even have to go over what sucked about this? I mean, it's pretty friggin' obvious if you're even half-paying attention while watching it! Going over what was good about it would be easier: nothing! There was nothing good about this movie! At all! Jesus H. Christ in a box of crackers this was an unwatchable mess. I walked away from this depressed, angry and more cynical at the world – but hey, at least it gave us the timeless advice, Never Buy a Demon on the Internet! Yes, truly now I’ll be a better person for that! GOD THIS MOVIE SUCKS.

Images copyright of their original owners, despite whether anyone would actually ever want to own anything in this movie or not.