Stitches Review

Movie: Stitches
By: J Rotten
Date: April 17, 2013

The fun begins when you're dead

Conor McMahon, who's known from his short movies (BrainEater, Wanker, 1902) and the Zombie Bashers tv-series is back with his second full movie after The Disturbed. McMahon shot The Disturbed in only 5 days without any effects and improvised dialogue. Will Stiches be his first success for the mainstream horror fans or will it be the next The Disturbed?

Richard Grindle aka Stitches is a clown who works only for the money and he doesn't give a rat's ass about the children. After he put up some acts he gets more and more irritated because none of the kids likes his cheesy jokes. When one of the kids, Vinny, tying his shoelaces together Grindle trips with an fatal ending. But now, 6 years later, he's back from the dead to haunt those who took his life. Tom, whose party it was, has been traumatized by guilt ever since. Once a popular kid, Tom is now lonely, shy, and his childhood sweetheart, Kate, is dating a self-obsessed drummer. In an effort to cheer him up, his friends organize a house party on facebook to celebrate his birthday. Of course, this soon goes awry and a quiet night in with a pizza and a movie becomes a banging' house party loud enough to raise the dead. Which it does. It seems that clowns are damned to purgatory if they die before finishing an act and with his audience reassembled, Stitches rises from the grave to finish his act in bloody fashion.

Ross Noble in a horror movie? I know Noble from the stand-up comedy show Just For Laughs and to be honest: He doesn't have my kind of humor till I saw Stitches. Noble plays the role of the evil villain Richard Grindle with verve and really surprised me. I'm also surprised by the nostalgic looks of the film because it felt like I was watching a 80's/90's movie. When Tom (Tommy Knight) throws a big 17th birthday party one of the invitations blows away by the wind and landed in front of Stitches gravestone and this is when the fun starts. Stiches is just a movie for the laughter because the whole film leans on jokes and humor. Even the gore moments makes you laugh because the murders are very inventive fabricated while they all have a highly clownish touch. Especially the death of school bully Paul (Hugh Mulhern), who came in a clown suit to the party just to annoy Tom, made me laugh.

I thought Stitches was very predictable but that's in fact not so bad as you will think. It's just like a Adam Sandler movie: You know what's going to happen, you know how the story ends, but still you have fun watching it. There was only one thing that bothers me. The whole movie is made around Ross Noble... The other actors, Tommy Knight, Hugh Mulhem and Gemma-Leah Devereux play there parts very well but their characters are to shallow. It looks like McMahon only took time to make some fun kills and jokes for Noble (some jokes are made by Noble itself). Because of the shallow characters I haven't felt any sympathy for either one of them in the whole movie what makes the kills a bit meaningless.

Stitches is a bit like the 90's horror flicks: a lot of jokes, very inventive kills, and some cheesy gore from a child loving boogeyman. I can't help myself to compare it with Stephen King's IT, also a child-killing clown who came back to revenge those who took his life, and who's also filled with typical jokes, but still a lot different. It looks like McMahon wants us to compare Stitches with IT because he gave the whole movie a little bit the same feeling as his illustrious predecessor. So if you're in for a big laugh about funny gore moments: you'll be well satisfied with Stitches.