Mr. Jingles

Well, new week, same genre. This week, my agony runs deep with Mr. Jingles, the "sequel" to SICK. Ugh. All right, let's just take a deep breath and try to get through this as painlessly as possible. SPOILERS, as always, but save yourself from misery and just never rent this.

Right off the bat, I just started watching this thing, but I don't see how it's a sequel. None of the characters seem to be connected to the first film at all, and besides the fact that there's a clown killing folks, the two movies have nothing in common. Well, unless "bad production values count. Another bad sign? Many of the opening credits only give first names, and they weren't using a spell-checker. I guess no one wanted this crap coming back to haunt them on their resumes...

The movie opens up with a "young girl" named Angie watching a clown named Mr. Jingles kill her family. Angie looks about 30(okay, maybe mid-20's), but has pink pajamas and pigtails, so I guess we're supposed to buy the premise that she's a kid. As Angie hides, the clown murders her mother: first by stabbing her,then by bashing her head repeatedly into the floor. The sound her head makes smacking against the floor is cheesy and poorly timed with each impact shown.

Anyway, once Mr. Jingles finishes killing off her mom, he goes looking for Angie. Oh, and he's able to locate her by the smell of her urine. Yup. Maybe he should be called Mr. Tinkles. He also looks a little like Carol Channing.....

Outside, 2 detectives are sitting in their car, apparently just randomly going door-to-door with the hope that a murderer shows up for them to apprehend. Gee, that's logical. They hear the noise of Angie fighting off the killer, and rush to the rescue. The cops shoot Mr. Jingles to death, but he promises to return for Angie right before his injuries kill him.

The story then picks up the action about 7 years later. About the only change in Angie is that her pigtails are gone. Hooray. Through her conversation with her shrink, we find out that she's been hospitalized ever since her parents were killed, and that she's about to be released into the custody of her aunt Helen, where she'll be raised with her two cousins Heidi and Dylan, both of whom are also "teenagers".

Heidi can't wait to see Angie again, but Dylan could care less. He's Goth, so his role consists mostly olf him being surly and showing the emotional range of a fern. A dead fern. In the trash. He and his friends decide that the best way to welcome Angie home is to play cruel pranks on her during her welcome home party, and crack jokes about her family being murdered in front of her. Boy, and I thought MY family reunions were tough to sit through!

Angie is picked up by Aunt Helen(who, along with cousin Heidi, looks like she does porn...), and falls asleep during the trip home. She dreams about Mr. Jingles, who grins at her. Angie wakes up very abruptly, causing Aunt Helen to worry about her.

Then the story switches to the office of the mayor. He seems pretty upset about Angie's release from the hospital. He gets a mysterious phone call, swears at his secretary, and generally chews the scenery. Who cares? Not me!

Back at Aunt Helen's house, Dylan is smoking weed with his friends Chris, Curtis and Melanie. He tells his friends the story of Mr. Jingles, who apparently targeted several families from their neighborhood. Heidi disrupts their powwow session to let her brother know that Angie and their mom are on their way, and the pot party quickly disbands.

The movie delivers another random scene. A mystery man surrounded by candles is reading a book. He declares that someone is returning that very day, then he slams the book shut. HUH?

When Aunt Helen and Angie get home, Dylan and Heidi come outside to welcome Angie to her new home. Inside, Heidi waits for Dylan to leave, then shows Angie where her brother stashes his pot. In his room, they find a scrapbook he's been keeping, filled with clippings about Mr. Jingles and his murders.

Dylan heads to Melanie's house, where he tries to back out of the prank they had planned. Mel's dad overhears them and seems interested in the news about Angie's return. Um, shouldn't these people be dying soon? PLEASE?

Nope. Another scene change. Some drunk guy staggers over to the local graveyard to tell all of his woes to the dead. During his drunken tirade, he hears bells, and Mr. Jingles chops his arm off. Then the clown hacks him into pieces.

Angie and Heidi take a walk, and Heidi reveals that she enlisted her friends to throw Angie a party. At the same time, Aunt Helen gets a phone call, and is forced to fill in at work that night. Gee, a house full of unsupervised 20 year olds pretending to be teens....I wonder what will happen?

The mayor has a rendezvous with Melanie's dad. They discuss all of the mysterious phone calls, and it seems that the caller is the unknown guy with the candles. There's some conspiracy involving how Mr. Jingles died, and they're all in on it. Once again: who cares? So far, this is the least slashiest slasher ever slashed! If it doesn't start picking up steam, I may go on a killing spree myself! The only real mystery is why this is considered a sequel to SICK.

Dylan and his friends are discussing the night Angie's family was murdered, and Melanie shows up. Their pranks involve grave-robbing and a bag of props, so maybe Carrot Top will have a cameo. Again, everyone survives the scene.

Mel's dad and the mayor meet to discuss Mr. Jingles. During the conversation, the mayor gets a phone call, and finds out about the murder at the cemetary. He suggests that they should stick together, but Mel's dad would rather find his daughter and leave town.

Heidi introduces Angie to her friends, none of whom can act their way out of a paper bag. After they all debate the merits of having sex with band guys, one girl, named Trisha I think, is called a "slamhole". Wow.

The goth kids see the meeting at the grave. The 3 adults discuss the night of the original murders, and it's revealed that Mr. Jingles was the victim of vigilantes. The real stalker was a guy Mr. Jingles tried to stop. He went on his killing spree after escaping from prison, to get revenge on the townsfolk who ruined his life.

Aunt Helen tells the girls that she has to go on a business trip, and quickly leaves. At the graveyard, Mel tells Chris and Curtis to dig up Mr. Jingles' headstone, while she and Dylan start setting up props and decorations designed to scare Angie.

Heidi calls her friends, and tells them that Angie's birthday/welcome home party is on. At the gravesite of Mr. Jingles, Chris and Curtis hear ghostly circus music. Mr. Jingles castrates Curtis, then throws the teen's severed penis at Chris, who promptly get stabbed by the demonic clown. I'll bet that John Wayne Bobbitt hates this film even more than I do...

Dylan, now alone with Melanie, tries again to change her mind about the pranks on his cousin. Mel changes his mind instead, by going down on him. Back at the wacky demon-hunter's apartment, Bill(Mel's dad) finds a book on demonology, and the wacko monster hunter reveals that he was one of the cops who shot Mr. Jingles. A flashback is shown, only this time we see that the clown uttered a demonic incantation of some sort before he actually died. He apparently spent his prison time studying the occult, and sold his soul for the chance to get his revenge. Whatever.

Heidi takes a shower, and goes topless for us. Remember when I said earlier that the aunt looked like a porn actress? Well, I was wrong. This chick is definitely the porn-movie type. While she's bouncing around and singing, Angie falls asleep and dreams about Mr. Jingles again. When she wakes up, she tells Heidi that Mr. Jingles told her he'd be back.

Dylan and Orca--oops, I mean "Mel" finish having sex, and decide to get ready for the night of pranks. The domon-hunter and Bill get their "enchanted" weapons ready to fight Mr. Jingles, when there's a knock at the door. It's the clown, who punches his supernatural fist through the demon-hunter's gut, and gives Bill a blood-soaked middle finger on the other side, cackling the entire time. Mr. Jingles produces 2 axes out of thin air and proceeds to hack Bill to death.

Back at the house, the girls engage in more pointless jibber-jabber about boys. Heidi enters the room, bringing Dylan's secret stash of pot with her. As they start lighting up, the boys arrive. There's a blond guy named Parker, some other dude named Rusty, and the rest are all just fodder waiting to die.

Dylan and Mel show up, and Dylan spies his box of marijuana sitting out in the open. He goes inside to break up the party, while Mel changes into a clown costume. Dylan forgives Angie when she produces some pills that she stole from the hospital. He hugs her, and all is forgiven. Awwwwww...

Outside, Mel has finished putting on her clown costume. She practices using a scary voice, then finds the corpses of Chris and Curtis. Mr. Jingles jumps out at her, and kills her with another swift fist-impalement.

Everyone inside the house pairs off. Angie goes into the basement with Rusty, and holds onto her virginity for about a minute. The "slam-hole" girl starts doing it with a guy who looks like a homeless drifter, and the rest stay in the kitchen. Dylan sees what he thinks is Mel outside, and decides to freak out the others by pointing out the clown at the window that everyone else somehow misses seeing.

They go out in the yard, and Heidi trips and falls into a puddle of blood. Her boyfriend, Jason, gets killed from behind, then Mr. Jingles taunts Heidi, right before planting a hatchet in her head. Mr. Jingles cracks a few puns, poses their corpses, then leaves.

Slam-Hole lets Hobo Guy go down on her. As she starts to climax, she opens her eyes, sees Mr. Jingles above her, and is killed. Not realizing that Slam-Hole is dead, Hobo keeps kissing her torso until a thick stream of blood catches his eye. He sees Slam-Hole with an axe in her forehead, and Mr. Jingles kills him as well. Mostly off-screen, sadly.

A hot girl named Jen sends her boyfriend outside with Dylan to patrol. At the same time, Angie has a vision of Mr. Jingles, and stops Rusty from going all the way. He leaves her in the basement, and the clown kills him and a buddy named Parker when they decide to leave.

Parker's girlfriend, who is actually pretty hot, tries to comfort Angie, who is still crying in the basement. This gives Mr. Jingles an opportunity to kill Dylan, repeatedly slamming his weapons into the teen's back until he starts coughing up blood. Hearing Dylan getting killed, Angie and the hot chick escape through a narrow basement window.

Mr. Jingles grabs the hottie, and slashes her throat in front of Angie. She runs back into the house to call for help, but the killer clown follows her. When she discovers all of the corpses inside, sitting at the dining room table(a la Happy Birthday To Me, a much better film than this one...), the police burst in and assume that she killed everyone herself.

During her arrest, the mayor shows up, and tells a cop asbout her parents being murdered in a similar fashion. Outside, Mel's dad arrives and knocks out the cop who was escorting Angie back to the hospital. In the schlocky film's ballsiest moment, he rips off Terminator by saying, "Come with me if you want to live!" The movie ends with the mayor and the young cop being killed simultaneously by Mr. Jingles. THE END
Well, it was better than SICK, but that's pretty faint praise. The gore was certainly impressive(compared to the first film, at least), and this one had a solid clown concept, but it still reeked of "a few friends decide to make a movie for the heck of it" in many ways. 2 out of 5 killer trees, with the hope that they decide to resolve the cliffhanger someday withn an even more polished final product.

So, what did Mr. Jingles teach me?
-Undead, demonic clowns love puns and delivering wounds in the back.
-Any slam-hole can make a film, even if they don't have a clear ending in mind.
-Ex-cons who also dabble in black magic are a dime a dozen. Same with ex-cops.

Next week, I've got both Season of the Hunted and Jason Goes To Hell on my queue, so we'll hsave to see which one arrives first from Netflix. It'll hopefully be a fun week. Happy slashing!