Killjoy 2 (2002)

MARCH 1, 2012

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

The first Killjoy wasn’t a good movie by any means, but merely the right kind of bad: it didn’t wear out its welcome, the plot moved fast enough to forgive its myriad other problems, and… well that’s pretty much it. But that’s part of what makes Killjoy 2 such a woeful experience – it can’t even live up to the original’s low bar of “eh, I’ve seen a lot worse”. The tiny shred of goodwill the movie had to start off with (that is, being a sequel to a marginally entertaining slice of nonsense) is vanquished before Killjoy even shows up, and his scenes do nothing to restore it.

Thus, I guess it doesn’t matter that it takes forever for him to show up. The movie is about the same length as the original (72 minutes with slow credits), but that’s about all it has in common besides the titular character himself. I was actually kind of impressed that Killjoy was resurrected and seemingly carried out his entire revenge plan in the movie’s first 35 minutes, but here he doesn’t even show up until after that point. Instead, we just get interminable scenes of our group of inner city punks being dickish to one another and their supervisors. They are being brought into the mountains for what I assume is some sort of community service - it’s not really well explained, but it doesn’t matter because they never get there, their van breaks down in the middle of nowhere (in the dark – how exactly was this community service going to work?) and they seek help in the woods, because that’s what makes sense. Anyway, they run across a redneck, who shoots one of the “kids” (how the cop describes them, even though one guy is clearly in his 30s) and is then killed herself. There’s also a prologue in which we see the arrest of one of them; it’s not clear why the cops were after him to begin with, but they plant drugs on him which is presumably what puts him away. Then the main cop is presumably killed off-screen (we hear gunshots), so basically it seems like they are setting up a number of potential Killjoys, which would actually be kind of interesting.

But alas, it has no payoff. Killjoy is just a demon resurrected via voodoo, and neither him or his plan have anything to do with anything that happened in the first half. It’s also completely different from the first movie; whereas there he brought folks to his dimension and had powers, this one just sort of wanders around like any old slasher, endlessly mugging in between off-screen kills. Said kills are remarkably unimaginative too; the best idea is the very first, where he sets his own clattering teeth inside an outhouse and they devour the girl within. At least, I THINK they devour her, we don’t see any of it, not even blood hitting the walls. We get the outtakes, of Killjoy just standing there as presumably interesting things happen inside the stall. And again, this is the first thing he does in a sequel to a film that had racked up like three kills already. Lus he’s incredibly lazy; he just stands around talking during most of the “scare” scenes, and doesn’t bother to even react when they make an effort to fight back. Then again, one girl’s big defense is to give him the finger, so maybe he’s just smart enough to realize that none of these assholes are a threat.

Oops, I was wrong earlier. The other thing this movie has in common with the original is a confusing off-screen gunshot kill in the movie’s tragedy. But at least there we got the general idea of where it was (his chest); here there is no such clue. He’s coughing up blood instantly, but he lives for a while, and also she shoots him at close range with a shotgun but there’s no exit wound on his back, so your guess is as good as mine. The cop then shoots her, which one guy describes as “blowing her head off” a few minutes later but just looks like he grazed her temple when we actually see it. I mean, come on – anyone renting this damn movie only cares about two things: funny lines for the clown to say (preferably when stoned, I assume), and gore. It barely delivers on the first and doesn’t deliver at ALL on the 2nd; hell, even Killjoy himself goes down without much of a fight. In the first movie he died like 3 times, surviving explosions and such; here he is taken out for good when the hero throws some acid on his face about 30 seconds into their first encounter.

It’s also made poorly, the sound mix in particular being a sub-amateur embarrassment as the sound dips in and out in between cuts, and poorly dubbed at times (particularly in the prologue). And I KNOW that they actually reworked this movie recently because the copyright date is noticeably changed to 2011 in the end credits. So they took the time to do that but they couldn’t spend 20 minutes or so fixing the audio? Even for Band this is just a giant “fuck you” to the audience. Luckily, the 3rd film has a different crew yet again (same guy playing Killjoy, however – oddly enough, Deadgirl screenwriter Trent Haaga), so maybe things will improve.

What say you?