Killjoy (2000) [REVIEW] | Wishmaster In Da Hood

This is a re-write, sorry, but i’m not feeling keen on watching a random horror clown movie… again, i don’t particularly loathe or love clowns per sé, and i’m not feeling like reviewing Killer Klowns From Outer Space… YET, there is actually a proper sequel finally in production, 30 years after, but what the hell, i honestly didn’t expect for the follow up to come out, like ever.

Then again, this ended up being a more involved rewrite then planned, it’s basically redone from scratch (almost entirely, anyway), so i’m gonna borrow a page from the game industry and call this the “Definitive Remastered Edition” of my Killjoy review.

January has been so unbelieveably busy, even more than planned for, so let’s talk (“again”) about the first Killjoy film, since in my homecountry this is also month of “Carnevale/Carnival”.

A series that has seen a couple of new entries in the last decade, as Full Moon Entertaiment has been consistant in pumping these out with some regularity (after the 8 years separating Killjoy 2 and 3, that is), when they can stop themselves giving sequels to Evil Bong and remember most people actually care more about new Puppet Master entries than Demonic Toys ones.

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[EXPRESSO] Night Swim (2024) | “Get Out Of My Friggin’ Pool!”

Based on a short film of the same name by director Bryce McGuire, Night Swim is the kind of horror film that actually speaks for itself very clearly since it’s what the trailer (kinda ) made it look like, as in it’s a movie about a haunted pool.

The premise sees a family move in to a new house as the father, a baseball star whose career got cut short by a degenerative illness, forcing him to an early retirement. Still secretly hoping to get back into the Major Leagues, he decides to clean up the pool as he thinks will be good for his rehab and be fun for his kids too, unaware of the house’ dark secrets……

It almost feels like an accidental american remake of a Japanese horror film from the 2000s, like someone by pure coincidence remade 2002’s Dark Water (again), or somewhere along those lines, despite not actually being that kind of movie, as the lore get explained it’s hard not to see it that way, because despite the stupid-ish sounding premise, something could have been done with it that’s not subpar, weak cluster of cliches.

Silly as “haunted pool” sounds-is, the water-centric scenario could have been used to some effect, and there’s effort to make it work as a serious horror film, but it doesn’t help that the result it’s something that makes you whip out your theasurus to avoid saying “it’s shallow/lukewarm”, despite it being that insipid and ineffective, with accidental “anti-jumpscares”, stock characters, the lack on any proper atmosphere, or anything that hasn’t already been done way better before.

It’s just “not enough” in any regard, while also being “too much”.

[EXPRESSO] Argylle (2024) | Spy Harder

Matthew Vaughn is back with that is essentially a Kingsman spin-off taking place in that universe/continuity with Argylle, which goes for the straight up spy comedy/parody with a premise that inevitably echoes Romancing The Stone, and by extent 2022’s The Lost City, but about spies.

Elly Conway is a successful writer of a spy series of novels titled Argylle, and while about to finish up the final chapter of her next book, she is approached by a real spy that reveals her books ended up mimicking too closely the machinations of a real life evil shadow mega-organization, forcing her to follow (with kitty in tow) the real life agent Argylle in order to escape the assassins sent after her.

There is more to this, and it’s a nice variation on this formula…. but i can’t deny at times it feels like an outright spoof done by accidents, as the twists keep coming to a degree that it almost feel like an actual joke (but ain’t) and the fun premise is ultimately weighted down by a convuluted plot and an overly long runtime. This really should have been 90 minutes.

It’s a bit too self-satisfied at times, especially in terms of meta jokes that aren’t too original or funny, the execution it’s far from lacking flaws, but i won’t deny the premise does give the formula some energy, the plot gets some needed mileage out of said premise, enought to keep you fairly entertained, with some fun performances, but it does suffer because often it weaponizes genre cliches unironically without actually improving on overdone tropes.

Despite all that, i’d say it’s still a decent time, but i do hope that the planned sequels (if they do come out after this “part 1” bombing so far at the box office) are better.

[EXPRESSO] The Piper (2023) | Devil’s Trill Sonata

It is “evil Hamelin”?

Yes.

And yet people say i can’t do short reviews.

To be honest, this isn’t even that bad of a movie to deserve being summed up “evil Hamelin ghost’s revenge”…. yet it is that, it’s exactly that.

The plot sees a struggling musician strong-handed by her maestro into retrieving a music sheet from her mentor, as she was reluctant to finish the piece, a children’s concerto, even tried to get rid of it before her untimely and gruesome death.

She manages to steal the sheets to get ahead and provide for her semi-deaf daughter, but soon realizes her actions unleashed a sinister presence that starts influencing people, especially children…

It has decent-to-good production values, decent acting, it’s not completely boring, but it’s also utterly predictable, very run-of-the-mill in pretty much every aspect, from the characters, the motivations, even the lore that basically amounts to the usual reworking old folklore legends told to children in a horror context, so we have the entity as the Pied Piper of Hamelin, back for revenge… or something, you get the feeling they don’t show him too much in the movie because they didn’t actually know what to do him until the third act, and boy he does feel like a missed opportunity for a more refined antagonistic phantasm/entity.

Every now and then it has some decent or satisfying moments that avoid it slipping into sub-par slop, it helps that it’s fairly short, 90 minutes with a decent pacing, but for every positive there’s some bullshit that eventually brings it back to being incredibly average and easily forgettable/disposable, despite some effort that – again – doesn’t ultimately pays off in any significant way. The very definition of “nothing special”.

moral of the story: pay people when they do their fuckin job.

[EXPRESSO] The Beekeeper (2024) | Sleeper Cell

Let’s start the year off with the new Jason Staham movie, The Beekeeper.

One merry day, a kindly but tech “un-savvy” old lady is scammed by one of those “call this number to recover your computer” operations, resulting in them draining all her money, even the 2 millions of the pro-bono teaching fund she was tasked with.

In utter despair, she commits suicide, and her daughter, working at the FBI, initially thinks is the man whom she found in her house, but he was simply her neighbour, a quiet man that worked as a beekeeper and was beyond grateful of the kindness bestowed upon him by the old lady.

So he sets out in a quest for revenge against those responsable, because he’s a beekeeper, but also a “beekeeper”, as the codename given to highly trained assassins, one-man army agents belonging to a super-secret government project, operating outside of the system to protect the system itself in case it becomes unstable or operated by bad actors.

Some very bad actors in this case, not that will stop Jason Staham to avenge her kindly neighbour by kicking ass, eventually crushing skulls and popping caps into anything that doesn’t wanna de-escalate scamming people, when the sheer magnitude of his one liners somehow doesn’t immediately scare the life out of the douchebag thugs and their untouchable masters.

It’s a decent action romp with some nice ideas that ultimately delivers a lot of satisfying graphic violence, the plot it’s essentially nothing new but the flair (and the “bee angle”) is nice enough, the action is enjoyably cheesy, and it’s a pretty straighforward narrative that doesn’t wast time nor tries to sequel bait.

It’s definitely better than most of the other movies Staham was in last year, this is decent, and very, very entertaining indeed.

12 Days Of Dino Dicember #36: A Sound Of Thunder (2005)

Since we’ve looked at a LOT of low-to-no budget dinosaur films this year (maybe even more than usual), let’s end with something that actually released in most english-speaking cinemas, had some actual movie studios and actually known industry faces attached to it, with A Sound Of Thunder.

Based on a short story of the same name by Ray Bradbury and set in the still “distant” future of 2055, it tells the story of a company, Time Safari, that offers to rich customers the possibility to travel back in time and hunt dinosaurs.

Due to the huge risks involved with the “space-time fabric and whatnot”, the company regulates the safari by hunting species of dinosaurs that would have eventually died anyway of natural causes and keeps the clients from stepping off the designated path of the safari experience.

While on a hunt, a gun malfunctions, forcing the team to scatter and flee from an Allosaurus, and even if they eventually regroup, when they come back to their time with no harm done… they soon find out their actions had consequences, like a sudden increase in global temperature and the over-night instant, abudant growth of plant life, with further trips resulting in even more messing with the space-time continuum and endangering the existence of humanity as a whole…

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 29: Jurassic Hunt (2021)

I don’t know what it is about dinosaur movies with “Hunt” in the title that makes them suck, but it seems like a recurring theme…… wait, not really, Triassic Hunt was one of the better ones spat out by The Asylum, and to honest this one actually reminds me a little more of Jurassic Attack/Rise Of The Dinosaurs, due the outdoors locations being at the forefront, the mercenary squad sent out with a mission and the cheapo-depo levels of production, being one of those Dazzler Entertaiment distributed titles that immediatly scream “we filmed this in a national park or something”.

the plots sees the cast of Shock Troopers (or more accurately, its Data East knock-off) fighting dinosaurs into a hunting area designed exactly to be a secretive location where the game is jurassic, while “megane Regina from Dino Crisis” tags along and can’t stop giving away that she isn’t there for the actual dino hunt and that she’s basically working undercover to document the whole thing.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 28: Kingdom Of The Dinosaurs/ Dinosaur Valley (2022)

More relatively fresh dinosaur meat, because the grind never stops even for these.

And nope, this is not another Jurassic World : Dominion mockbuster…. kinda, it’s pretty much that, as it comes from prolific and fairly fresh GB-based low budget C-D grade movies supplier Jagged Edge Productions, better known for the recent Winnie The Pooh slasher film (and its sequels), many “Curse Of” movies about some random public domain-fairytale character turned slasher villain, Bunnyman rip-offs (i’m not joking), but also behind a lot of pretty obvious mockbusters, including releasing something called something called Freddy’s Fridays the very same year of the Blumhouse FNAF movie being out in theathers, so yeah, shame was never an option.

Among these and others, they also pump out dinosaur movies, like the previously featured Dinosaur Hotel, which in the meantime got a sequel and a third entry on the way. So yeah, this company is clearly set on being the new Asylum, or Full Moon Pictures, for better or worse.

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12 Days Of Dino Dicember # 26 : Jurassic Domination (2022)

In a way, there’s little i can complain about a movie like Jurassic Domination, because i pretty much known what i’m going to get from a modern Asylum mockbuster of a dinosaur film, even down to them not really marketing them anymore so even trash buffs and cinema shit seekers like me end up finding out about them years after they came out, undermining the point of a timely release dor the mockbuster to leech off a big budget tent-pole release, in this case Jurassic World: Dominion.

And yet everytime i come out slightly disappointed because i’d like for The Asylum to at least try more with the plots, since their mockbusters are even more and more detatched from the movies they allegedly exist to profit off indirectly with their bootleg low budget offering, they could try to go utterly insane with the plots if they will never improve budgets and effects to any significant degree, but why would they put any more effort if people still watch their garbage regardless?

They know people like me will start combing the internet for these kind of movies, sooner or later, so why bother? They’re so cheap to be worth it from a financial standpoint regardless, so until the well dries up completely, they won’t stop, and it’s hard to fault them for that when the Jurassic World series exists and the difference between the contenders and the “champions” is how much money they can throw at the fx budget to cover up botched or flawed scripts.

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[EXPRESSO] Disquiet (2023) | A Game Of Disappearing Nurses

An unplanned trip to the Netflix content mill yield the discovery of Disquiet, which i feel can be described as the “Silent Hill haunted hospital unofficial movie”….made by people that never actually played Silent Hill.

Still, it has an undeniably strong opening that explains the premise and gets the mystery starting, with a man, Sam (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), that after a car accident wakes up in a deserted hospital, deserted minus the man in the next bed that tries to strangle him, gets shanked by Sam countless times, then simply disappears. Then a nurse appears, only to also disappear, Sam being chased again by the crazed patient, and finding other people that are also trapped in this limbo-esque location..

It’s not a good movie, heck, i can understand how you could be frustrated because as a horror movie it’s really generic, derivative and honestly by the end it’s easy to forgot this is not just a supernatural thriller, that angle makes it easier to “swallow” as you’re curious than cautious about what happens, but it’s also an excuse because this is a horror film.

One ripe with characters that are trite but still enjoyable despite having no depth (aside the protagonist Sam), and plenty of various horror building blocks, like the “scarecrowy scary faces”, many flashbacks, not scary “scary parts”, leading to a fairly predictable scenario.

Regardless of you wanna slice it, i don’t hate it or think it’s atrocious, at least it’s not boring and the direction manages to keep things going nicely, it’s pretty disposable, and while it cops out by spoon feeding the ending’s meaning to the audience…. the ending could have easily been worse.

So it’s worth at least a watch to kill some time.

On Netflix, i wouldn’t bother going to the theathers for it.