Stitches

Alternate titles : Killer Clown.

Tagline : "You'll Die Laughing."

Set in Ireland, the film stars Geordie comedian Ross Noble as an exceptionally foul mouthed children's party entertainer, named Stitches the Clown. Whilst trying to keep the unruly young brats entertained at young Tommy's birthday party, he has an unfortunate accident with a pair of knotted shoe laces and a carving knife, and that's the end of poor Stitches. Or is it....

Flashing forward 6 years and Tommy's friends twist his arm into throwing a party at his house whilst his parents are away for the weekend. Inviting many of his class mates over, as the music starts and the alcohol begins to flow, it seems that someone else who was at Tommy's last birthday celebration all those years ago has decided to make an aappearance.

Yes, Stitches is back. Seems he was part of some black magic clown cult (or something rather silly like that), and following a ritual by the other clowns in his group in the nearby graveyard, he returns to gatecrash the party. Shortly afterwards, the young kids that were responsible for that fateful accident 6 years ago begin to discover that jokes are never as funny the second time round...

Also starring Tommy Knight (that lad out of the "Sarah Jane Adventures") and Gemma-Leigh Devereux (from "The Tudors") overall I really liked this one, Noble is aptly cast as the foul mouthed Stitches, who kind of reminded me of Captain Spaulding from "House of 1000 Corpses" and there were some really funny scenes, though I did find some of the comedy a little hit and miss in places, as I'm not really into "Inbetweeners" style teen-humour. Plus, for a film set in Ireland, there seemed to be rather a lot of English actors in this.

But the film more than made up for this with Noble's sleazy performance and the spectacular graphic excesses, which include someone getting their eye gouged out with an umbrella, in a scene that would put a Fulci film to shame, and another unfortunate sole having his entrails ripped out and fashioned into balloon animals.

So to sum up, I'd advise checking this one out, though it's definitely not a film I would recommend to people who suffer from coulrophobia (that's fear of clowns).

Overall Marks : 6/10.

Terrifying Trivia

• Comedian Ross Noble actually used to be in a clown troupe and worked as a street juggler, as well as selling balloons as a stilt walker, before turning to comedy. Several of the tricks he does with the knife and the umbrella he actually performed himself and were not done using camera trickery.
• The idea of Stitches came about after Writer/Director Conor McMahon was trying to write a horror-comedy, but was having difficulty making the comedy element of the script work. So figured if he made the killer a Clown, that would be sufficiently silly.
• The Graveyard used in the film was Craugh Cemetery, located South of Dublin, which was the same one used in the classic 1968 Michael Cane film "The Italian Job".
• The idea of clowns painting their face make up onto an egg when they join a troupe wasn't made up for the film. There is a society called Clowns International and when you join you have to have your face make up painted onto an egg, which is held in their registry and acts like a copyright of your particular make up style. Clowns International actually have a bank vault full of these painted eggs. When director Conor McMahon found out about this he decided to include the egg painting into the film.
• Mark Hamill was nearly cast as Stitches.
• Ross Noble caused a bit of a stir in a local pub during filming, as he went in to use the toilet after shooting the graveyard scene whilst still wearing all his gory clown make-up.
• The medication that Tommy takes to relieve anxiety is called "Hypnocil", the same name as the medication used to suppress dreams in the Nightmare on Elm Street series.

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