03/03/2009
Blogging:: 0 comments: by JE Smith
We all love a good Killer Clown movie, but this is not the place to find it.
Hybrid horror rears it’s ugly head with Amusement, a rather tepid scare flick that gives us three genres for the price of one, and doesn’t provide a whole lot of entertainment along the way. Don’t be drawn in by the Scary Clown on the box cover – he’s only in it for about fifteen minutes, and hardly does any mayhem to anybody.
Three pretty girls (Katheryn Winnick, Laura Breckenridge, Jessica Lucas – because who would watch a horror film about three ugly girls after all?) run afoul of a demented killer who turns out to be the weird little boy they knew in their preteen years, and who now wants to make grisly “art” out of them, and exact bloody revenge for… not much of anything really.
Amusement seems to think it’s clever by shifting tones about every twenty minutes; at first it’s a road-kill movie with an overlong sequence featuring Shelby (Breckenridge) and her boyfriend being pursued by a looney in an old sedan. Then it shifts to an ‘80s homage with the (same) killer dressed in a clown suit and wielding a fat butcher knife at – yes – a babysitter, Tabitha (Winnick). Finally Lisa (Lucas) and her BF show up, and we segue into the expected torture-porn arena with blood-splattered leather aprons, bodily dismemberment, and weird old mildew-stained buildings; this bit has some truly head-scratching moments, like the sudden appearance of a social worker, and a very odd and unmotivated “twist” concerning the killer’s lair. This segement also borrows freely from The Cell and the Hellraiser series, with all the tied-by-wires imagery. Actually, the stories are all a bit jumbled up because most of the movie is told as a flashback. I think. Amusement brings nothing fresh to any of these various sub-genres, and often feels like an abandoned anthology film that somebody reworked into a linear script, and not one that makes a whole lot of sense. Though it has a couple of “wet” moments, it also doesn’t rate very highly on the grue-meter; the torture crowd is probably going to be disappointed.
That said, it’s not exactly boring, and manages to be somewhat watchable, but hardly memorable, even while it’s still running. Yes, the girls are beautiful (don’t expect anyone to get naked, though), and yes, there are a couple of creepy moments, but there’s just nothing to recommend it over any of the thousands of other interchangeable horror titles at Blockbuster.
The DVD is totally bare bones, though my copy came with an offer to get a free digital copy for your iPod in case, y’know, you just need more crap clogging up your player.
We all love a good killer clown, but this is not the place to find it. Lacking the courage of its convictions, Amusement doesn’t make much of an impression, but might be passable as a cheap rental or, even better – watch it for free on cable.
Location: Irving, Texas
Occupation: Freelance
Bio: JE Smith, aka Jeff S., is a forty-something guy who was born in Illinois, but has been living in the wilds of Dallas, Texas for more than twenty-five years. He has been a movie nut ever since seeing Escape from the Planet of the Apes at Steeleville Theater in 1971 and is also obsessed with Doctor Who, Ultraman, Star Trek, The X Files, Batman, Spider-Man, Doc Savage and many other pop culture icons. For fifteen years (1981 - 1996) he published the sf/horror filmzine Wet Paint, and tried his hand at self-publishing his own comics with Bulletproof (1999, 3 issues) and Complex City (2000 - 2003, 4 issues and a trade paperback), both of which bombed. He's been writing film reviews for almost thirty years and is just getting the hang of it. Married to the lovely Barbara for over 16 years, and owned by a sleepy cat named Max.
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