Starring Charles Austin, Wayland Geremy Boyd, Bobby Marsden, Aaron Brown, Logan Alexander, Debbie Rochon, Nicole Pulliam, Choice Skinner, Olimpia Fernandez
Directed by Tammi Sutton
Expectations: Moderate. I loved the first one, but I have a bad feeling about this one.
On the general scale:
On the B-Movie scale:
I loved the original Killjoy, and even though I had heard some horrid things about this sequel, I held out hope. With an intro featuring a badass foot chase through an office building with low-rent funk blasting out of the soundtrack and white cops calling black perps motherfuckers, I thought I was about to find another modern blaxploitation horror gem. It was all a ruse, though, and quickly my excitement waned as the actual movie set in. Killjoy 2 concerns a group of young criminals being transported in a van to another facility… somewhere. At night, their van breaks down in the middle of nowhere and without any cell service, they venture out in search of a house with a phone they can use. That’s about half the movie so I should probably stop there.
The original Killjoy was low-budget at around the $150,000 mark, but it made the best with what it had and crafted an interesting, fun film. Killjoy 2 was made for the smaller sum of $30,000, and while it tries to make that work, the quality of the writing and the situations are just so poor that it’s nearly impossible to be entertained by this film. It only runs seventy-two minutes but it is an absolute slog to get through… well, that’s not entirely true. The first half, while bad, is infinitely more enjoyable than the last half when Killjoy is around. I know that sounds odd, but Killjoy was so scaled back and different in this that he only made me sad. Perhaps his on-screen strength is directly proportionate to the quality of the reason why someone is summoning him. In the first film there was a lifetime of pain and bullying, but in this film it’s only a desperate attempt to heal their friend’s gunshot wound. What were they thinking? Killjoy isn’t named Healjoy, he’s a fucking killer clown! The bastards in Killjoy 3 better have a damn good reason to call up Killjoy from the depths!