Killjoy (2000)

Really Surprised!

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Crappy film

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

This is a low budget African-American horror film that develops into a better franchise. Michael (Jamal Grimes) has a crush on Jada (Vera Yell), who in turn is the girlfriend of bad boy Lorenzo (William L. Johnson). Lorenzo and his gang are bullies and thugs. Michael attempts to use black magic to conjure up something called "Killjoy" which we know nothing about, or him as there is no character introduction.Things don't go well for Michael and we jump to a year later where the remaining cast must combat Killjoy, a magical killer clown with an ice cream truck transporter. The acting and lines were fairly bad. There is a magical homeless guy that really isn't explained. The clown was rather repulsive, and that was by design...I think.Parental guide: F-bomb, sex, nudity (Napiera Groves, Miss District of Columbia 1997)

Awful awful stuff.Doesn't even fit into the so bad it's good or funny category. Everything is abysmal, story, characters, acting. The movie is actually quite short but succeeds in managing to feel like 3-4 hours.Watch anything else instead!

Never heard of this film beforehand but seen it as a 4 movie set for £5 and thought can't really go wrong paying £1.25 per film.Finally got round to watching this the other day and i didn't quite expect it to be as bad as it was. I now fully understand why it was so cheap.Everything in the movie was pretty horrible; the acting, the camera quality, the score (sounded like i was watching a 1970s porn movie I'm baffled as to how this became a 4 movie series thing. It's the only movie which has made me question my judgement in buying a DVD despite never hearing of the movie.Just avoid at all costs!

Sometime after Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American to win an Oscar for her role in "Gone with the Wind," someone asked her if she felt she had done a disservice to her race by playing a maid. Her response was something like, "Better to play a maid than to be one."The urban horror film "Killjoy" seems to have been written and produced specifically in that mindset. An inner-city take on the traditional supernatural stalker movie in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" vein, "Killjoy" concerns a demonic clown who exacts revenge for the violent murder of a young man who dared to talk to the girlfriend of a sadistic gang member.Almost every negative urban minority and female stereotype is present here. In the ghetto world of "Killjoy," most African-American and Latino males are violent, drug-obsessed gang members, and most women adore the wrong men and get naked all the time. When confronted with something that puzzles them (for instance, a murderous demon clown), the reaction most often of the male characters is a posturing, strutting "Yo, cuz? What the f***?""Killjoy" makes you feel sorry for its actors, who are obviously compromising everything they believe in as the grandchildren of the Civil Rights Movement to pay their bills with their salaries as performers here.And folks, there are some talented people in "Killjoy." Arthur Burghardt, who played a doctor on "One Life to Live" and an attorney on "Knots Landing," is here reduced to playing a magical negro (Spike Lee's term, not mine) homeless man who, somewhere in the middle of the movie delivers a monologue which does nothing but summarize the entire first half of the film that came before it, clips and all. That's right - "Killjoy" is so condescending to its audience that it assumes its viewers couldn't even pay attention for its first 45 minutes."Killjoy" isn't awful cinematically. There's some eerie, atmospheric filmmaking present here which services the story nicely, if in an unremarkable way. Killjoy, as a character, is sufficiently creepy (but really, it's not all that difficult to create a creepy clown, and a zillion movies have done it a zillion times better).But what "Killjoy" truly represents as a movie is the sad reality of the racist nature of the American film industry. Really, how many positive, hopeful, truthful stories can be told about urban American life by Hollywood? But how many are? How often are black and Latino actors required to play stereotypical or negative characters in movies, and how representative are those characters of the true population of those minorities in the United States?That's the saddest part of all. The makers of "Killjoy" could have explored horror and terror in an inner-city environment in a truthful and honest way without perpetuating negative racial stereotypes. Look, for instance, at a film like "Candyman" for well-executed, terrifying urban horror that has the confidence in itself not to fall back on the unfortunate and unjustified social fears of the white majority.Actually, I take that back. The real saddest part of all is that "Killjoy" spawned two sequels.