Killjoy (2000)

Following on from the likes of DEF BY TEMPTATION and LEPRECHAUN IN DA HOOD, KILLJOY is an all-black horror film from Charles Band's Full Moon Pictures. It's also an resolutely terrible film in every respect, in which the paucity of the budget is apparent in every aspect of the film-making. The calibre of the script is matched by the sheer awfulness of the cheapie CGI effects.The story is a predictable piece of guff in which a young student is bullied by members of a low-rent criminal gang. His revenge comes in the form of Killjoy, a maniac clown with magical powers who proceeds to transport his victims to his evil domain before killing them in various gratuitous and incredibly silly ways.It's amateur night all round here, with some of the most stilted acting you'll have seen in a while, although I admit seeing some of those lousy effects of characters burning up or disintegrating did give me a chuckle or two. Thus KILLJOY isn't the worst horror film after all, just a very poor one.

Now, I'm not a very tough critic so to speak, but this movie was not as bad as I was expecting, considering I was only expecting to rate it around 1 star. That being said, it was still pretty bad. The only thing that kept me from rating this movie any lower than what I did was that Killjoy the clown made me laugh a few times (the part where Killjoy says "now that's how you bust caps, muthaf**ka" is, in my opinion, the best part of the whole movie), but other than that it was just plain boring. I found myself just sitting through the movie waiting impatiently for what Killjoy the clown was going to do next.But as I said, it wasn't QUITE as bad as I was expecting. Maybe the reason for that is that I read so many reviews that before I even watched the movie I was expecting it to be really bad. So as a result, I wasn't as disappointed as I thought I would be. If you are planning to watch this movie and are expecting big budget Hollywood blockbuster standard acting, storyline and special effects, then there is a big, and I mean REALLY big, chance that you will be greatly disappointed.Now, there's a lot of things about this movie that have already been said in numerous other reviews, and I'm not going to say them again, so I'm just going to give you my basic description: it was boring, but Killjoy may make you laugh.If you are going to watch this movie, my advice is to expect something bad, and chances are you may at least slightly enjoy this.

This is so far from the worst films I've ever seen it's not even close. Killjoy is indeed a Nightmare on Elm Street knock off, there's no denying it. What separates Killjoy from the lower garbage is it has an ambitious and respectable swagger to it. The cast, for this type of project, are pretty good. They are attractive and all put on acceptable performances. The main antagonist Killjoy, is a Freddy Krueger-ish inspired clown/demon of vengeance...or some such mission. His makeup is all well and good and his performance is what you would expect from the type of outlandish "clown prince of demons?" he is playing. There are plot holes and the plot and dialog erode considerably at the end but this little b movie with a black cast gets knocked around more then it should. It would have been easy for the characters to slip into over the top caricatures of their respective roles but everyone stays in a comfort zone convincingly well. Also I applaud the pacing, I found it crisp and moves the story along at a brisk pace....there's not a lot of "day dreaming" or time wasted. The effects are pretty terrible. More money budgeted to the effects would have probably tacked a star or 2 on most reviews. The cinematography is small screen variety, just not a lot going on creatively with camera shots or visual interest. End of the day...with 3 sequels behind it, you could do much much worse. It's an average movie by any measure and if you go in not expecting too much you should be fine.

Sometime after Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American to win an Oscar for her role in "Gone with the Wind," someone asked her if she felt she had done a disservice to her race by playing a maid. Her response was something like, "Better to play a maid than to be one."The urban horror film "Killjoy" seems to have been written and produced specifically in that mindset. An inner-city take on the traditional supernatural stalker movie in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" vein, "Killjoy" concerns a demonic clown who exacts revenge for the violent murder of a young man who dared to talk to the girlfriend of a sadistic gang member.Almost every negative urban minority and female stereotype is present here. In the ghetto world of "Killjoy," most African-American and Latino males are violent, drug-obsessed gang members, and most women adore the wrong men and get naked all the time. When confronted with something that puzzles them (for instance, a murderous demon clown), the reaction most often of the male characters is a posturing, strutting "Yo, cuz? What the f***?""Killjoy" makes you feel sorry for its actors, who are obviously compromising everything they believe in as the grandchildren of the Civil Rights Movement to pay their bills with their salaries as performers here.And folks, there are some talented people in "Killjoy." Arthur Burghardt, who played a doctor on "One Life to Live" and an attorney on "Knots Landing," is here reduced to playing a magical negro (Spike Lee's term, not mine) homeless man who, somewhere in the middle of the movie delivers a monologue which does nothing but summarize the entire first half of the film that came before it, clips and all. That's right - "Killjoy" is so condescending to its audience that it assumes its viewers couldn't even pay attention for its first 45 minutes."Killjoy" isn't awful cinematically. There's some eerie, atmospheric filmmaking present here which services the story nicely, if in an unremarkable way. Killjoy, as a character, is sufficiently creepy (but really, it's not all that difficult to create a creepy clown, and a zillion movies have done it a zillion times better).But what "Killjoy" truly represents as a movie is the sad reality of the racist nature of the American film industry. Really, how many positive, hopeful, truthful stories can be told about urban American life by Hollywood? But how many are? How often are black and Latino actors required to play stereotypical or negative characters in movies, and how representative are those characters of the true population of those minorities in the United States?That's the saddest part of all. The makers of "Killjoy" could have explored horror and terror in an inner-city environment in a truthful and honest way without perpetuating negative racial stereotypes. Look, for instance, at a film like "Candyman" for well-executed, terrifying urban horror that has the confidence in itself not to fall back on the unfortunate and unjustified social fears of the white majority.Actually, I take that back. The real saddest part of all is that "Killjoy" spawned two sequels.