What with the weird rash of clown sightings that have been cropping up this year, it’s time for a good old fashioned killer clown movie. Pleasantly surprised to find Ross Noble playing the part of the titular Stitches as I am generally a fan of his. I also had no idea what the actual deal with the plot was outside of a clown goes around killing people. Turns out it’s one of those supernatural vengeance movies but you kind of aren’t really rooting for or against anyone. We’ll get to that later, though.

The story starts with Stitches the clown going to put on a show at young Tommy’s birthday party. The kids are kind of dicks but then he is also kind of a shit clown. Then a freak accident has the clown falling onto a butcher knife and dying. Thoroughly traumatized by this event, Tom hasn’t had a birthday party since until this year when his mother will be gone and he is coerced into having one by his friends. Now with all the original kids once again gathered for Tommy’s birthday, Stitches returns from the grave to make sure that he finishes what he started and put on a killer show. *cue Crypt Keeper laugh*

The movie is fun and has plenty of amusing deaths in it with most of them being throwbacks to how the kids were assholes during the original party. So, for example, the kid that popped the balloon animal gets his head blown up like a balloon and popped. While the deaths themselves are done with some fun practical effects, the deaths don’t really have the same meaning as they might in another movie. We don’t really spend enough time with the victims as kids to identify them with any specific traits and the movie has to remind the viewer of who exactly each person is and what they did whenever they get killed because otherwise you’d definitely not have remembered. As teens, we get some basic set up of who they are now but nothing that feels like it ties to how they were as kids.

I did like the way that they handled Stitches in the film. He is basically unkillable but still has limitations that you can get around. He still has to move like a regular guy so you can run from him and he still has a body so, even though you can’t kill him, you can slow him down. I appreciate a threat that still follows some rules. He even has a macguffin weakness object that is the way to beat him so it isn’t just a straight up hopeless fight against an unbeatable monster. His ability to sneak around a party unnoticed for most of the film is kind of ridiculous but that’s about the only noticeably weird bit. Even when he kills people, there is some excuse as to why nobody hears it. Also, his car in the beginning of the film has a broken headlight mirroring where he would get stabbed. Nice little attention to details.

Mostly it was a fun movie to watch with extreme gore mixed in with incredibly bad puns. Like a Nightmare on Elm Street movie but with a clown. I’d give Stitches a 4 out of 5 since I appreciate what they were going for.

Favorite thing in the movie: Bulger (one of the kids) is fucking awesome and I wanted him to be the last one standing.

Least favorite thing: Really needed to either spend more time with them as kids or as teens to really make me care more about the deaths one way or the other.