Stitches

I found myself navigating around Tubi the other day. I realized that when I constructed my list for the 31 days that I had inadvertently overlooked their catalog of films. I will say on the whole that Tubi typically has genuinely good content for an entirely free streaming service. Once upon a time they might have been a little more bottom of the barrel and kind of a joke of a streamer, but anymore they are up there near the top in terms of what kinds of films you can watch for absolutely zero dollars a month. And on top of that, they really don’t advertise you to death to compensate. Even with a pain subscription to many of the main stream services, I’m still catching a lot of ads in the Prime movies, as well as Paramount+ and Peacock. They’ve been my more prominent go to’s this Halloween season for all films spooky. But in scanning the selection on Tubi I somehow ended up on Stitches. I still don’t honestly know what the motivation was to click play on this one. I might have hit my head or something.

The movie is a terrifically low budget flick about a birthday clown named, you guessed it, Stitches. He’s crass and vulgar and not worth whatever fee he charges. But in this one he shows up at a birthday party for a kid who is WAY too old to have a clown as the “entertainment”. However that’s the way this movie goes and before long we are celebrating the Stitches way. Close up magic, juggling and other schtick from your standard clown performance are topped off by a butcher knife to the head. Only it’s not how you’d imagine. Somebody placed a gigantic, sharp knife with the point facing up in an opened dishwasher just waiting to impale someone. Unfortunately it went right through the eye of Stitches. He tripped on something and then bam, knife meet eye socket. Pulls the knife out and blood goes everywhere and then somehow the knife ends up in his face again. It was like 10 minutes into the movie and I was beyond regretting my selection.

So Stitches is dead. That sucks right? Well then there’s an evil ritual a bunch of other clowns do in the graveyard that night. Somehow the lad whose birthday it was ended up making his way down to the cemetery in the middle of the night and stumbles upon this silly ceremony of evil proportions. If you were guessing that this would lead to the eventual resurrection of Stitches at a very unfortunate time later in the movie, you are correct. Fortunately we get to fast forward to when these preteens are in high school and are far less likable than their already significantly unlikable preteen selves. So that’s a win. Turns out it’s the main kid’s birthday coming up again. I’d tell you his and any of the other kids names if I cared enough to remember them or look them up. But I don’t. There’s like 8 of them. Maybe more. Main kid’s mom is going somewhere for business or maybe to dig up treasure or perhaps a vital surgery that’s far less expensive in a Scandinavian country. I don’t know. Didn’t seem worthwhile to keep tabs on her. I should note that this film does take place in England. That may have been the only redeeming quality of the film. But main kid, lets call him “Mason” for simplicity, is having a birthday. Mason goes and makes up 3 very special invitations for his friends “Agrod”, “Wenztel”, and “Linten”. Those are not real names but still don’t care. They might as well be their names. The shitty kid of his three friends puts the party on MyFace or some equally shitty made up social media. Fortunately his three amigos are going to get there early to put up all the Christmas lights and garland one typically puts out for a high school party. Oh and there were snacks, which was a good thing.

All the kids show up and begin to parse off into smaller groups to discuss the current economic landscape or perhaps the latest developments in windbreaker technology. It was made to be a high school party but it seemed more like the worst cocktail party for introverted little people. But also several kids snuck off to have sex and just be miserable little shits in various places in the house. Personally I wish the film had been called “House full of British teenagers collapses in a fiery earthquake during a birthday party for a kid probably named Mason” but that feels a bit long winded on the cover box and unfortunately all the kids were not swallowed whole into a sinking grave created by tectonic activity. Nope, instead we are greeted by the return of Stitches. That rambunctious rapscallion has returned from the afterlife from that one clown ceremony earlier in the film. I don’t know if it was like a full moon or that it was the kids birthday party or maybe just a really great sale a K-Mart that Stitches couldn’t pass up. Regardless of the motivation, he’s there to murder those kids because they may or may not have been the reason he died earlier in the film. I think he thinks they killed him. I don’t really know and I care even less. But he is successful in killing some of the children. The down side is he’s not able to kill all the children. In a stunning turn of events, some of the children, Mason included, realize Stitches is back and they decide to do something about it. And they do. And that thing they did stops Stitches. I think. I wasn’t even really distracted by my phone or anything it was just a remarkably bad movie. So I just couldn’t care. But he died again and I think everything was ok. I’m pretty sure the kids he killed stayed dead. So that’s kind of a bummer for their families. But they probably didn’t even really notice. Most of these kids were rather insufferable even as near adults.

So this was a movie and I watched it. I know it sounds like it was a huge waste of my time and that’s accurate. But I do dedicate a portion of this 31 days to some of the worst tripe that’s out there in these insanely dumb little horror videos. It kind of goes with the territory. This one just wasn’t enjoyable. You get those “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” or “Killer Klowns from Outer Space” that aren’t great movies in their own right but there’s a cult classic aspect to them that makes them just campy enough to be a certain kind of fun still. This movie is just the film equivalent of having a broken catheter removed from your urethra. Even after it’s over it still stings. So don’t watch this one. I wish I hadn’t. There’s nothing redeeming. I’m merely cataloging the voluntary wasting of my own time, an insanely valuable commodity I can never get back that I’ve pissed away on 2 hours of this dumpster fire. I know I’ll watch other bad horror movies. Just lets all agree no one should watch this one. If you’re a fan of this movie, I’m sorry. You’re an improper human person and should probably go live in a cave so you can’t hurt yourself or others. But that’s it. Lets end this. Until next time, I’ll catch you on the flip side.