• Directed by Craig Ross Jr.
• Written by Carl Washington
• Starring
  • Angel Vargas
  • Vera Yell
  • Lee Marks
  • Dee Dee Austin
  • Jamal Grimes
• Produced by Mel Johnson Jr.
• Executive produced by Charles Band

Probably more than any other Big City Pictures production (with Mel Johnson, Jr. producing and Charles Band exec-producing), Killjoy deserves the description of “an average, stereotypical Full Moon flick, but with black people.” That’s not a compliment. A bunch of witless stereotypes are mired in a slipshod excuse for a script centered around a supernatural baddie designed expressly for reproduction as an action figure. It’s not the worst film in the Full Moon canon by most measures, but you’d be hard pressed to find another one which so consistently fails to entertain.

The main plot engine (I wouldn’t call him a character) is Michael (Jamal Grimes), American Nebbish in da ‘Hood. You can tell he’s the mistreated underdog: he’s got a bookbag, a shirt with a collar, and — wait for it — glasses. He’s also got a thing for Jada (Vera Yell), a nice enough girl whose misfortune it is to be attached to (and therefore owned by) Lorenzo (William L. Johnson), the local self-appointed Bad Ass. Lorenzo is so insanely jealous that just the sight of Michael conversing with Jada on the sidewalk — separated by a chain link fence, even — is enough to earn Michael a savage beating, mostly at the hands (and feet) of Lorenzo’s two flunkies, T-Bone (Corey Hampton) and Baby Boy (Rani Goulant). You know, I’m starting to suspect that one of the causes of the simmering rage of the ghetto is that all of the good nicknames are taken.

“My first wish will be for — carpet!”

That night, Michael does what any 98-pound weakling would: he tries to summon the forces of darkness to inhabit the form of his doll, Killjoy. He’s interrupted in his not-terribly-successful attempts by Lorenzo and his posse, who drive him out of town to terrorize him with an unloaded gun. Well, mostly unloaded. They accidentally unload it a little more, and Michael is left a corpse on a dirt road. (Just think how much more they would have hurt him if they’d known that just before they picked him up, he had been playing with a doll.)

One year later, not much has changed around the ‘hood, except that Jada and Lorenzo are no longer a thing. (Jeez, Michael, if only you could have played it cool for a few more months…) Lorenzo’s moved on to a fresh piece of tail, and Jada’s studying hard and trying to make something of her life, while also trying to get over Lorenzo. Because he was such a prize to begin with, you know. She’s helped somewhat in the Getting-Over Department by Jamal (Lee Marks), her handsome and intelligent study partner who speaks like a poet to woo her — or at least like an R&B lyricist.

And finally, Michael’s revenge shows up in an ice cream truck.

“We call it ‘ethnic targeting,’ boys. What’ll it be?”

No, really. An ice cream truck pulls up outside the tenement where T-Bone and Baby Boy have been smoking weed, and they go out to it to satisfy their munchies. The purveyor of quiescently-frozen delights is Killjoy (Angel Vargas), a trash-talking clown who looks like the inbred cousin that Ronald McDonald doesn’t like to talk about. When he offers the homies some drugs as well, they hop into the back of the truck, and are sucked into “his world.”

That is to say, a warehouse. A warehouse with spraypainted windows and plenty of cardboard boxes stacked around. Note: If your plot revolves around people being sucked into an alternate demonic reality, make sure you’ve got better ways to realize it than some old warehouse.

After cat-and-mousing with the two gangstas for a few minutes (pad pad pad pad), Killjoy burns one alive and runs the other down with his ice cream truck (a phenomenally poorly staged scene), cackling all the while like a low-rent Joker.

Then, in far more time than it takes to tell, Killjoy goes after Lorenzo. Part of the padding here is a love scene between Lorenzo and his current squeeze (Napiera Danielle Groves), followed by a too-long conversation about him not respecting her and where he plans to be in five years. I’m sure somebody thought that this kind of inclusion would “humanize” the characters; however, it’s already obvious that we’re watching what amounts to an episode of Lifestyles of the Small-Minded and Inarticulate, and this scene does nothing to change that assessment. It’s almost a relief when Lorenzo gets pulled through the ice cream truck into the Warehouse Dimension, except that we’ve still got several minutes of padding - mostly Lorenzo posturing and Killjoy cackling - before Lorenzo finally dies.

Finally answering the question, “What if the creature from Stephen King’s It had a lovechild by Pippi Longstockings?”

I should point out somewhere in here that, as cruelly-humorous supernatural villains go, Killjoy is the absolute nadir. If a killer’s shtick is that he’s funny - a clown, in fact - then I don’t think it unreasonable to expect him to occasionally exhibit some wit, even by the reduced standards of the played-out character type. Instead, Killjoy gets such clever lines as, “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” and “I’m your worst nightmare.” Aside from the ice cream truck, there’s nothing that extends the killer clown motif into any of his other actions; he’s simply an unfunny clown, hanging out in a boring warehouse.

Now. We’re still far away from the closing credits, yet the gangstas from whom Killjoy was called to exact revenge are all dead. What do we do? (The first answer would have been “Write a second draft of the screenplay,” but it’s way too late for that.) So now we need to involve all of our remaining characters, who really haven’t done much: Jada, Jamal, Jada’s best friend Monique (D. Austin), and the Expository Bum. That’s right, the Expository Bum: A homeless man (Arthur Burghardt) whom we saw once earlier, when Michael was first getting his ass handed to him. He now shows up in Monique’s apartment and rehearses for her, Jada and Jamal everything that’s happened in the movie so far. (Because you’re not getting your money’s worth out of any footage you only use once.) He then explains to them that they are all in danger from Killjoy, for no good reason, and that “only the love of a young woman” can stop Killjoy. That, and destroying the doll from which he was spawned. He then disappears in a cloud of sparklies, back to wherever he exists when he’s not being called upon to assist writers who are too lazy to structure their stories competently.

I just thought you might like another shot of Killjoy. Really, who wouldn’t?

The three of them decide to proactively enter Killjoy’s realm via the ice cream truck, and this is where the storyline goes from “perfunctory” to “nobody making this actually gave a damn.” The next twenty minutes is a parade of arbitrary actions, false endings, and general stupidity behind and in front of the camera. Even trying to summarize it for you would cause my brain cells to cry; you know it’s bad that Jamal insisting “We gotta split up!” isn’t the worst part. Neither, heaven help me, is the three-minute debate that ensues on the relative merits of splitting up before they do eventually split up. While I can’t confirm this, my impression is that the entire last act of the movie was written by tacking on a scene, then tacking on a further scene, then another, then another, until finally it was confirmed that there was enough material to fill seventy minutes.

What’s especially galling is that, aside from the script, the other elements of the production may actually have been pretty good. As far as one can tell, the actors all acquitted themselves well (though hearing them gush in the behind-the-scenes footage about how much room they were given to explore their characters makes them seem utterly delusional). The cinematography and editing don’t seem substandard, aside from one scene which resulted from not having enough money to stage the ice cream truck smashing someone against the wall; but again, it’s hard to edit at the top of one’s craft when the footage one has to work with is nothing but banal dialogue and directionless padding. And while the world certainly doesn’t need another killer clown movie, Angel Vargas as Killjoy seems professional enough that, had he been given anything amusing to say or do, he could have done it very well.

In the ghetto, even alternate dimensions are uninspiring.

Instead, thanks to working from a screenplay boring enough to kill, the final product is so poor that the only way it could be worse is… to have a sequel.

A final side note: Though I rarely remark upon a movie’s packaging, take a look at the synopsis on the back of the “Limited Edition” DVD:

In the night time streets of an inner city hell, people are dying horribly, torn to pieces by KILLJOY, a ghastly figure with a painted clown face. At first hailed as a latter-day vigilante, it soon becomes obvious that Killjoy may have a very different agenda. Perhaps the mutilations are performed to conceal the fact that parts…are missing. Perhaps there is more to Killjoy’s apparent invulnerability besides a bullet-proof vest[.] Perhaps after all, Killjoy is not merely “inhuman” but - non-human.

Go ahead. Try to relate that plot description to the movie reviewed above. I dare you.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 4
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0