Killjoy: The Official Nerfed Llamas Review – There Are Winners & Losers, And Then There’s Whatever The Hell This Is…
Today’s review comes on special request from a follower on Twitter, which if you aren’t following me on there – click here and see what you’ve been missing. Today’s review is for the clown themed horror film Killjoy, and if you’ve ever wanted to know if it was good movie or not, then allow me to spoil the bottom line for you right now: it is not. I go into every movie with a fresh mindset, open to the possibilities of what the filmmaker has in mind, and hopeful that their vision will ultimately make for an entertaining movie. I’m not a very critical reviewer, and frankly I’d rather watch an off-beat movie than a mainstream flick any day of the week. Give me more gleefully creative and bizarre movies like Trancers, Tape Heads, ThunderHeart, or the Hysteria any day of the week over the likes of super popular films like Titanic, Twilight, or even Star Wars for that matter. Look, I like all kinds of films, I even gave a glowing review for Captain America: Civil War, but I gravitate to the off beat flicks. They can’t all be winners, and even though I tried to find the positive in Killjoy, ultimately I found it an exceptionally rough movie to watch, even by b-movie standards. Even still, I soldiered on to watch it for the sake of my month long tribute to Full Moon Features.
What is Killjoy: Killjoy is about a young man who is bullied daily for liking the local thug’s girlfriend. On one night, when the young man had been pushed past his limit, using a bizarre voodoo like ritual, he calls forth the demon Killjoy, a killer clown who takes the thugs and everyone else involved to a strange alternate world where Killjoy is the clown prince of death. Directed by Craig Ross (Ride or Die, Motives), from a script by Carl Washington (Urban Massacre, Voodoo Tailz) Killjoy stars: Ángel Vargas (Quick Change, Salvador), Vera Yell (Anderson’s Cross, Stigmata), Lee Marks (Half-Life, Hood Angels), Dee Dee Austin (Can’t Let Go), Kareem Grimes (Baby Boy, Boyz N The Hood), Corey Hampton (Killjoy… lol), Rani Goulant (again only Killjoy), Napiera Groves (Happy Birthday Michael Peck, Airborne), William L. Johnson (Motives, Blue Hill Avenue), and Arthur Burghardt (Network, Transformers: The Movie).
What I Liked: Hmmm. The clown Killjoy was moderately entertaining. Maybe. The movie ended and was super short (72 minutes that I’ll never get back), I liked this aspect of the film as well. Also, this wasn’t purely a Full Moon Features film, as it was a co-production with Big City Productions, so in the overall scheme of things Full Moon isn’t solely responsible for this turkey. Oh, and there was some decent amounts of nudity, if that’s important to you. So at least you get to look at nice look actors without clothing on for a bit. I guess.
What I Didn’t Like: I’m going to keep this fairly short and sweet. My grievances with Killjoy are listed below:
- The first 15 minutes are coherent and track well, then the nearly hour afterwards the script becomes a hot mess. None of it makes any sense, especially the ending.
- Speaking of the script, the dialogue in this movie may be some of the worst I have ever endured in a feature length film before. Not in a so bad that it’s funny and endearing like in many low budget films, but more like a nobody talks this way and/or is that vapid all the time.
- The sets are sparse, the clown’s costume looks like it doesn’t even fit the actor, and the movie feels like it was made for 10 dollars.
- The acting (granted the script was not good) was worse than the average Full Moon fare by a wide margin.
- The movie was not scary. At all. Sure people died and there was blood and stuff, but you kind of want them to die, and so there’s no suspense because it never actually feels like anybody of importance is in any actual peril.
- It is a terrible representation of urban inner city living, even by thug standards with main character names like Baby Boy and T-Bone (no shit).
- This feels like a student film, and not in a good way. Killjoy is kind of like if Ed Wood attempted to make a Blaxploitation film.
Had this been a movie about rival inner city gangs, and the senseless violence and lives ruined by it, it might have been a decent movie.
Bottom Line: This movie is not worth a view, not even for the knee jerk rubbernecking reaction of wanting to see how terrible it truly is. I have a friend that will tell you that you’ll never know what Brownie Bottom Pie tastes like unless you take a bite, and in this case I took a bite and wished I could spit it back out. I know that this movie has spawned at least 3 more sequels, my genuine hope is that they got better than this one. I won’t likely be taking the plunge to find out, as one trip into the world of Killjoy was more than enough for me. I don’t recommend watching Killjoy for any reason, but if you must, it is available on DVD and via Full Moon’s streaming service.
Check out the trailer for Killjoy and then don’t pass Go and don’t collect $200, as you will be fully satisfied only watching the trailer:
