Mr. Jingles (2006)
I tell ya, I’ve seen trash-can garbage in my days. You could bury me alive in copies of crappy horror films that I’ve sat through and Mr. Jingles would fit right at home in that heap, which is why it deserves 0/5 stars despite there being exactly two good things hidden inside this 2006 no-budget trainwreck. Read on to find out what.
Seven years ago, Angie Randall (Kelli Jensen) witnessed serial killer Mr. Jingles (Rudy Hatfield) butcher her parents with twin hatchets while dressed as a clown. Gunned down by police, the lunatic vowed he’d return. When she's released from the mental institution, Angie tries to settle into a normal life, unaware the killer clown has risen from the grave.
This horror film was made by people who have no talent as writers, cinematographers, filmmakers, or artists. It’s a bunch of late 20-somethings who believe anyone with a camera is a born John Carpenter. If you're enticed by the decent-looking cover, you’re in trouble. There is a killer clown in this film. He is undead. He also looks nothing like that. Alliance Atlantis and Lions Gate, I hate you for releasing this film but at least I can rest comfortably knowing you pay your graphic designers enough for them to sleep soundly at night despite luring innocent people into this cinematic hell.
Evaluating this film is absurdly easy. It gets a "0" in every category. I don't even have to read the scoring sheet. Mr. Jingles is a no-budget horror film, meaning the sound, special effects, lighting, and locations are appalling. The script is abysmally written. Characters repeat themselves or deliver clumsily written lines that re-use the same words over and over, making it clear that whoever quickly slapped this waste has never even heard of the word “thesaurus” and paid little attention in English class. The acting is on a level of bad that’s so unbearable that it doesn’t even become “so bad it’s good”. Obviously, every “actor” hired was either a friend of the director’s or some homeless person who'd do anything for a shower and a sandwich. Every shot is shaky, slightly blurry, and never the least bit creative. It's so uniformly nauseating that had Mr. Jingles cut someone’s arm off convincingly, I would have been genuinely terrified. The rest of the film is so unbearably awful a genuine performance with realistic gore would've been proof of a real-life crime.
Even the story is crappy, with plot points leading nowhere and the ending being that right mix of so predictable you want to blow your brains out and so out-of-left-field you want to smash something over your head in rage. That brings us to the good things about this film. The first is that Mr. Jingles has a well-researched, legitimate Wikipedia page. Having to go back through this film to figure out which character was named what, and who played them might as well be a death sentence. A few days ago I watched another 0-star horror movie, a giant middle-finger to the audience called Biohazard: The Alien Force and that picture has no Wikipedia page. I couldn't handle that a second time so soon. The second good thing about Mr. Jingles? The running time: eighty-one minutes. I timed it. The actual running time is seventy-three minutes if you take out the credits. Those eight minutes might not be much, but they’re going to be the sweetest, juiciest, most productive minutes I’ve ever had. Mr. Jingles wasted less of my time than I thought it would.
Even if the idea of a bloody, severed penis slapping someone in the face makes you laugh and you’re curious to see what it looks like, find it in another film besides Mr. Jingles. Traditional movie viewers couldn’t possibly imagine how much of a chore it was to sit through Mr. Jingles. (On DVD, February 15, 2016)
