'When Evil Calls' isn't much past its novelty

When Evil Calls (2007)
Starring: Jennifer Lim, Sean Pertwee, Chris Barrie, Lois Winston, Gemma Chan, Lucy Barker, Dominique Pinon, Rick Warden, Oscar Pearce and Luke Lynch
Director: Johannes Roberts
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

A deal that one girl (Lim) makes with an evil spirit (Pearce) unleashes death and mayhem via text messages in a British high school.


"When Evil Calls" is a film version of the first-ever horror series produced for broadcast over cellphones. Each of the 20 episodes was 2-3 minutes long, offering up sex and gory violence brought on by evil magic--magic that causes wishes to come true in twisted and bloody ways. Here, they have been linked together with framing sequences featuring Sean Pertwee as a crazy janitor who is relating the horrible events and trying to be more and more like the Crypt Keeper as he gets more and more drunk.

Given its history, I acknowledge it as a novelty and probably even as a milestone. However, as a movie--and this is how I came to it and how most people will come to it--"When Evil Calls" is a run-of-the-mill low-budget horror effort with predictable and/or far-fetched stories that we've seen done better elsewhere, but which manages to rise slightly above similar material due to a better-than-usual cast. (Chris Barrie was particularly fun as the most oblivous school headmaster ever.)

However, when they were cutting the movie together, they should have trimmed parts of the original episodes. There was an annoying repetion in the film--over and over again, it established the content of text message recieved by victims of the evil magic received, something even the dimmest viewer would be aware of after the third or fourth time. I understand why that detail has to be reestablished every time a new episode is released in a serial, but there's no need for it when the pieces are packaged as a whole.

It also occurs to me that a better title for the film (and the original series) would have been "When Evil Texts". That is, after all, what is going on.

As a curiosity, the film might be worth seeing. Otherwise, I'm sure there are better things out there for you to spend your time on.

Evil Clown knocks them dead in 'Torment'

Torment (2008)
Starring: Suzi Lorraine, Tom Steadman, Ted Alderman and Lucien Eisenach
Director: Steve Sessions
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

A young woman (Lorraine) is released from a mental hospital into the care of her alcoholic husband. The two go to an isolated house so she can continue her recovery and they can renew their relationship in a quiet environment. Unfortunately for them, a psycho in a clown costume (Eisenach) is capturing and torturing people in the area.


This movie was hard for me to assign a rating to. While there is much about it that I like, there is much I don't like. It's one of the better psycho clown movies I've seen, but it's got some serious flaws.

Suzi Lorraine gives an interesting performance as Lauren, a former mental patient who spots a psychotic killer as he picks out his next victim, but who is disbelieved due to her history of mental illness. The way the script sets up the chain of events that leads Lauren into the worst possible danger is well executed and her confrontation with the Killer Clown (called Dissecto in the credits but unnamed in the film istself) is very suspenseful. Unfortunately, these strong parts of the movie are undermined and outweighed by the weak parts.

"Torment" feels like its two halfbaked scripts that have been combined into one film. They weren't necessarily BAD scripts... they're just unpolished and they work against each other and ultimately end up undermining what suspense and tension they could have produced if they had been two different movies.

The clunky dialogue at times made up for by some well done lines, and the few overlong and even redundant scenes in the film are likewise counterbalanced by some truly creepy, scary and startling moments. (For example, the repeatative expository scenes and dialogue of the fact that Lauren is fresh out of mental hospital are annoying, but they are more than made up for the scene where Dissecto invades her home, or when she is hiding in his.) As far as this goes, the good counterbalances the bad.

However, the way the film makes it crystal clear from the outset that Lauren isn't hallucinating the spooky clown lurking in the bushes-- the extended scenes of him torturing a pair of missing Mormon missionaries is most definately not something she's imagining--and so there is no real tension produced by the "is she crazy or isn't she" question... although it does make her husband come across like a grade-A asshole. If you're into "torture porn", I suppose you might enjoy those aforementioned scenese of Dissecto performing for and upon his victimes, but I'm too squeamish for that sort of thing--having recently experienced my own encounter with excruciating pain has made that sort of material hard for me to watch--but the sloppy costuming of the "Mormons" can't be anything but a strike against the movie. (It's bad enough one of the "Mormons" had a shaved head, but none of their missionaries would EVER sport a soul patch/jazz dot!)

Bad costuming (and the sloppy direction that allows it to happen aside) it's the absolute certainty the audience has of Dissecto's existence that undermines Lauren's story. It makes us dislike her husband to a disproportionate degree and it makes everything leading up to her encounter with Dissecto feel like it goes on and on, because we know the real action won't start until he dispatches the husband and starts stalking her.


And that's too bad. Suzi Lorraine gives an good performance, but my impatience with wanting the movie to get to where the real action was made it hard to notice. Tom Steadman likewise gave a decent accounting of himself as Lauren's moronic husband... and I think that if he had been given better dialogue to deliver, he might have been even better. (To a large extent, he's The Amazing Redundant Exposition Man, and this reduces his role to something less that what it could have been.)

"Torment" is a movie that has a lot to recommend to fans of thrillers, slasher movies, and "torture porn". Unfortuantely, the thriller elements and "torture porn" elements are at odds with each other and between them they almost manage to make the slasher element moot and make the ending seem false and forced because it doesn't feel like a natural outgrowth of anything. These, plus the stilted and clumsy nature of some of the dialogue and the excessive exposition in certain scenes drag this down to a low end of average, despite its strong points. (Speaking of excessive exposition... one thing the film never even hints at is the Who and the Why of Dissecto. Part of me would like to know more about him, but another part of me likes the "senseless evil" aspect this presents. I think the fact I'm torn is another sign that the script needed more work.)

Despite its flaws, though, "Torment" is worth checking out if you're into killer clowns, or if you enjoy small-scale horror films.

'Secrets of the Clown' is solid debut effort for 1st-time director

Secrets of the Clown (2008)
Starring: Paul Pierro, Dusty Mitchell, Michael Kott, Kelli Clevenger, Thomas Perez and Scott Allen Luke
Director: Ryan Badalamenti
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

Ater his girlfriend (Clevenger) leaves him, someone, or some thing, starts brutally murdering his neighbors and friends, and finally some evil entity starts haunting his home, Bobbie (Pierro) turns to a psychic (Kott) for help, A clown doll tthat his girlriend cherished seems to be at the center of everything, but will its secrets be revealed before Bobbie joins the growing list of victims?

"Secrets of the Clown" is a film that will remind you of films from Hammer Films, Amicus and American International in its heyday. It's a nifty little horror film with a classic feel to it, and if you enjoyed movies like "Burn, Witch, Burn!" and "The Devil Rides Out", you'll get a kick out of this one. You'll also enjoy it if you're an afficianado of the "clown horror subgenre"--yeah, I didn't realize there was such a thing either, but I've seen such a thing referred to in a couple of different places and I've seen enough clown horror flicks to accept that it could be a subgenre--as the clown motif comes into play on a couple of different levels in the film.

What's more, the titular secrets of the clown are not ones that you will readily guess. I thought I had the film figured out about ten miinutes in, but then a plot development proved me wrong. Then, when I thought I knew where writer/director Ryan Badalamenti was going, he threw another curveball at me. The secrets behind the murders and supernatural occurances in this film are not easily given up, and you'll be trying to figure out what's going on right along with the characters.


In fact, this film is unveiling its plot up to virtually the final moment of a very strong finish. Once again, I was reminded not to pre-judge a movie before the end credits start to roll. In this case, as the film came to a close, my first thought was, "Ah... they're leaving things open for a sequel. That's nice... this was a neat film and I wouldn't mind seeing a follow-up" but then came the twist-ending, and I thought, "He HAD to ruin a perfectly good film with yet another crappy twist-ending" and I almost stopped the DVD in disgust... but then Badalamenti put a twist on the twist and all was right with the world. He actually came up with an ending that was as neat as I'm sure he thought it was, a rare and precious thing.

Another very strong thing about the film is the use of sound throughout and the an excellent musical score by Matt Novack. Badalamenti is clearly a filmmaker who understands the importance of using sound and music to heighten the mood of a scene.

Another area that didn't quite work in the film was the acting (or maybe the direction), but it's a flaw that I see in many films at this level of production: The actors were all very polite and very stage-oriented in the way that no one stepped on anyone else's lines and everyone was very careful to not cross in fron to someone else while they were speaking their line. This causes several scenes to feel unnatural and still, despite the fact that most of the cast actually did a decent job delivering their lines. They just should have made it less obvious that they were, indeed, just delivering lines.

Among the actors, though, I want to single out Michael Knotts for praise. He did a wonderful job as the quirky psychic, playing the role with a level of over-acting that I don't think the world has seen since Bela Lugosi passed on. There are a couple of scenes where I wish he had dailed it down a bit, but, over all, he was great fun to watch.


(Trivia: "Secrets of the Clown" cost roughly $15,000 to make.)