Jingles the Clown (2009)

Jingles is a baaaaad clown.  The movie starts off with him video taping a private show with the Nelson family he has all tied up with duct tape.  He murders the parents and has time to cut the sons head off after he hears the cops coming.  Then after pulling a few more shenanigans and pranks on the cops he is captured, beaten, shot and stuffed in the trunk of a cop car.  The only survivor of the Nelson family is the young daughter Angela.  When one of the cops carries her back to show her Jingles bullet hole riddled corpse, Jingles opens his eye and winks at her without the cop noticing, the perfect traumatic ending to the perfect traumatic day for the little girl.  Later the sheriff and another officer are unable to contact the police who were supposed to be taking the clown corpse somewhere to dispose of it.  They decided to check on their comrades and find that they have been slaughtered.  After careful investigation (they found a shoe next to a hole in the ground) they come to the conclusion that Jingles apparently tried to jump in a muck filled hole in the ground to escape and drowned. 

Years pass before a TV show called “Haunted Maniacs” decides to do a story on Jingles the Clown from the same house his rein of terror ended in.  (Apparently he killed 30 other kids before he made it to the Nelsons.)  The producer for the show even got Angela Nelson to come back to the house to be in the program!  They don’t leave you in suspense very long about whether Jingles is still around.  The very next scene is a short scene where a teenage couple is slaughtered.  The next day the Haunted Maniacs crew arrives, providing plenty more victims for our friendly killer clown and bringing along Angela so she can be traumatized some more.   The rest of the movie is Jingles playing cat and mouse games with them all, killing them one by one.  There is a bit of a plot twist, but it doesn’t help make the story that much better.

This movie is good enough to have given me some hope in the beginning, but it didn’t deliver.  The clown was slightly creepy, but was too over the top and shown too much to work well.  There were a few times when they tried to make up for their bad special effects by having the camera flash away when they did something gory.  It almost worked, but then they started using bad CGI that pretty much ruined that aspect of the movie as well.  The acting wasn’t great, though some were better than others and I’ve seen much worse in low budget films.  There was actually some nice cinematography.  There were some cool shots of the location it was shot in and some neat camera angles.  The camera work was not shoddy at all.  The storyline however could use major work and some of the dialogue was just awful.  A lot of the one-liners thrown out just didn’t work and weren’t even bad in a way that was funny.  It’s sad to me that they didn’t try to throw a little humor into a movie with a clown as the main character.  Another problem with the movie is that the murders were very uninspired.  He’s just hacking at people with tools most of the time.  There’s no real flare or style to his massacring techniques. 

I wouldn’t really search out this movie if I were you, but I might not go out of my way to avoid it.  There are worse movies out there.  I just wish that this had more redeeming qualities to it.  So watch it if you want, but unless you have a good reason for wanting to see a killer clown movie, you can probably find a better way to spend your time.  I do hope these guys keep making movies though because I have a feeling that with a little better writing, they could make a decent flick.

For more information about where you can pick up this release check out their website at http://www.rsquaredfilms.com/jingles/jingles.html

2 out of 4

Reviewed by Scott Schwarzwalder