Amusement

This film is a good representation of the problems of the contemporary horror film. In pieces, it has some pretty good chills and some nice direction. But as a whole it is a complete mess, and as the credits roll you think to yourself, "Why did I waste my time?"

I Netflixed this one catching up with the film work of Laura Breckenridge (see my review of her stage performance in Bash from last week). Like many actresses who have some experience but have not achieved star level, she takes what she can get, and there's a lot of work for pretty young women in cheap horror films. Amusement was on the shelf for quite a while and then dumped into a straight-to-DVD release, and that's sadly where it belongs.

Despite it's title, it's not set at an abandoned amusement park. Instead, it's about a psychotic killer who loves to laugh. In three discrete scenes, we see three different young women tormented in archetypal horror situations: Breckenridge, along with her boyfriend, are driving on the highway and end up in a life-or-death struggle with a truck driver; Kathryn Winnick is babysitting two young boys and is creeped out by a life-size clown doll, who may just be alive; and Jessica Lucas looks for her missing roommate in a ramshackle hotel, the proprietor wearing a leather apron.

All of these scenes recall other films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or When a Stranger Calls, but I have to admit that director John Simpson has an eye for creating effective thrills and chills, particularly the middle section with the creepy clown. There's a great shot in which the clown is in the background, Winnick in the foreground. Simpson pulls focus on the clown, which slowly moves its head. If this film would have played in theaters, that would have been the scene where popcorn goes flying.

Unfortunately, this film makes no sense. It suffers from a familiar problem in these kind of films--the seeming invincibility of the killer. He is able to shrug aside puncture wounds to the throat and a fifty foot drop down a ladder, as well as having the foresight to be able to follow a car for hundreds of miles and get said car to pull off on a particular road. There's also the problem of the incredible killer's lair, in this case a massive underground bunker with huge cells (with walls that close in on each other), all built underneath a hillbilly's cabin. Yet somehow a police psychologist is lured inside.

So we end up with a hot-chick-in-jeopardy film that is from moment to moment gripping but adds up to junk. The ending is particularly groan-worthy, as the surviving heroine tells us in voice-over that she'll never forget what she went through. It comes across not only as a "duh!" moment, but also seems like the film just ran out of money at that point. That is a cool poster, though.