"Stitches" - Part Teen Drama, Part Horror Comedy - With An Evil Clown!

[philosoraptor42]

Stitches (2012)

In a way, it's hard to explain what is wrong with Stitches. The child characters (when they grow up a bit) are endearing (though it somewhat feels like an episode of Grange Hill). The death effects are inventive. But I'm afraid, as a big horror-comedy fan I found it was never terribly funny, nor did it ever successfully build up an atmosphere.



"Stitches" tells the story of a party clown who ends up being treated particularly badly by the children he is supposed to be entertaining. Unimpressed by his tricks, the children end up playing an off-the-cuff prank which causes him to stumble and fall head first - onto a knife. After witnessing this death th protagonist sees some kindof clown cult amassing late at night at a nearby church. He's not sure whether this was just a nightmare connected to his guilt or something he really saw, since nobody ever believed him. However, if the cult was real the suggestion seems to be that Stitches the clown could still come back to take revenge.



Now in his late teens, the protagonist finally gets the courage to have a proper birthday party with his friends. But Stitches the clown has been waiting for this moment...



Let's face it, the worst thing a slasher movie can do is just give us one death scene after another. They need to build up the threat of the villain and have people desperately trying to escape - at least when they are under attack. But here, the first victim barely knows he is under attack before having his head opened with a tin opener.



I have a lot of respect for the more recent scandinavian "Cold Prey" slasher movie series where, while they might not have the most inventive kills, they really do know how to build up the sense of threat and atmosphere - and for a horror movie that really ought to be the priority.

Still, with Ross Noble, a comedian, playing the 'evil clown' villain, perhaps the film simply isn't going for atmosphere. Perhaps this is supposed to be full-on comedy? Except that, and perhaps this is the problem, I didn't find any of it funny.



There's clear signs that "Stitches" is trying to ape the old "A Nightmare On Elm Street" movie series. There's a mean supernatural villain who kills his victims one by one with visually impressive effects while coming out with puns. The effects are pretty inventive with Stitches even being able to take off his red nose and send it sniffing out his victims. Some of Stitches' murder weapons include an umbrella, an ice cream scoop and a balloon pump. But still, even at his silliest Freddy Kreuger was creepier than this and, even with Ross Noble involved, I'm afraid the puns aren't any funnier than the ones Robert Englund used to come out with.



Now it may seem strange to be saying this by comparison to Freddy Kreuger who seemed to call every woman he ever spoke to "bitch", but I think Stitches the clown is just too mean. If this is a revenge story, the kills should have some relevance to the crimes committed. Yet the first victim is seemingly the first victim for no other reason than because he is fat and his death actively shames him for this. When we note that he seems to be the only gay character and that, shortly before he is killed off, he has just stood up for the protagonist and proven himself to be one of the more noble characters of the piece, his position in the kill list becomes particularly problematic.



Later on Stitches tells a plus-sized girl that she "has the stomach for it" when she finds the body of one of his recent victims. Now obviously he's a villain, but if they are expecting me to appreciate Stiches' kills, I'd rather he wasn't fat shaming all the time.



"Stitches" is a horror-comedy that isn't creepy or funny. There's some pretty good characterisation (even if they do have a 'children's television' feel to them), but in a villain-centred piece like this, there's no ignoring the elephant in the room.



Ross Noble puts his all into his body language and the special effects team have been very creative, but the audience needs a reason to care. With each character being ambushed out of nowhere, there's more time spent on killing the characters than there is on chasing them, leaving Ross Noble's performance ever divorced from the victims he is pursuing. As a result, watching Stitches the clown work take revenge on the children that killed him one by one is a fairly joyless experience.

D-