Directed by Conor McMahon

Starring Ross Noble, Tommy Knight and Gemma-Leah Devereux

A terrible, child-hating clown dies in an accident during his last gig at a boy’s birthday party.  Years later, the boy puts on another party and the clown rises from the dead to take revenge on all the kids that caused his mishap.

Review

Stitches isn’t a very good clown.  He looks messy, his tricks are awful and he hates kids, why is he even in this business?  Clowns aren’t even cool anymore as evidenced by the kids at Tom’s party.  They ruin all his tricks and are having none of it.  One of the kids sneaks up and ties his shoelaces and when he tries to move around he falls over and falls onto a protruding butcher knife that goes through his head.  Tom is quite rattled over what happened and developed a bit of a fear of clowns.

You’ll never guess where he pulled that out of.

Years later in high school, Tom puts together another party inviting several classmates while other students just show up cause they’re jerks.  However, thanks to some clown voodoo, Stitches comes back from beyond and shows up to finish the party he started years ago, this time with some new tricks up his sleeve to take his gory revenge on the kids that killed him.

When not trying to scare all the coulrophobes out there, the main story is mostly about Tom trying to woo his childhood crush, Kate, at his party.  However, he has violent visions of clowns sprinkled throughout the film and then when Stitches comes back from the dead, the film becomes a carnival of carnage.

Beep beep, kids!

The story is silly but this movie never tries to be too serious in the first place.  All the kids, from the jocks to the bullies to the cheerleaders, play their parts as you would hope and Ross Noble is of course the highlight with his portrayal of Stitches.

The movie is surprisingly good thanks to its inventiveness with the kill scenes.  Pretty much every kill has a ton of gore involved.  Just to give you a taste of what this movie delivers, all with just a hint of tongue in cheek humour, a dude gets his guts ripped out and turned into balloon animals, someone gets their brains scooped out like ice cream, that head popping scene is crazy and the umbrella through the eye scene was awesome.  The movie should be seen just to watch the awesome gore fx.

Well…show’s over.

If you can get over your silly fear of clowns, you’re in for quite the gorefest of a movie smattered with dark, british humour. 

TL;DR

Story: 7 – It’s a clown haters nightmare of a movie, a dead clown coming back from the dead to seek revenge on the kids that (unintentionally) killed him?  Yeah, they’ll hate that.

Blood: 9 – Awesome stuff, movie is worth watching just for these scenes.

Nudity: 2 – A couple of quick bra and panty shots.  The women get dudes in boxers.

Overall: 7 – I was honestly surprised at how much I enjoyed this movie.  It came out of nowhere and it’s definitely a hidden gem of a horror flick.

Trivia

-The movie is actually an Irish production.

-Professional clowns paint their unique face designs on an egg to act as a trademark.  Seriously.

-Also, don’t look up images of stitches, not pretty.