Josh Bell
This week’s fringe VOD releases find varying degrees of sympathy for Korean senior citizens, neurodivergent young people, and a misunderstood killer clown.
Super Happy Fun Clown (BloodStream January 1): The Terrifier movies have made clowns a hot horror commodity again, but Jenn-O (Jennifer Seward) is no Art the Clown. Director Patrick Rea and writer Eric Winkler at first seem to be setting Jenn up as a tortured, downtrodden loser in the mode of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, with a lengthy prologue detailing her unhappy childhood. The wan, slow-paced drama finally explodes into violence when the adult Jenn takes out her asshole husband and her condescending mother, but there’s no catharsis to the killings. It’s just a desultory murder spree with no motivation following those initial victims, and no creative nastiness to the death scenes. The uninspired visuals are accompanied by an atrocious score that sounds like someone trying and failing to tune an electric guitar. Jenn-O isn’t as brutal as Art or as righteously angry as the Joker, and her background becomes irrelevant once she puts on her clown makeup and stops speaking. It’s not an auspicious start for recently launched horror streaming service BloodStream. Grade: C-
People and Meat (Film Movement+ January 9): It would be easy for this Korean drama to fall into the trap of depicting old people in wacky situations, but director Yang Jong-hyun offers a sensitive portrayal of senior citizens finding unexpected connections, with a bittersweet but uplifting tone. Widower Hyeong-joon (Park Keun-hyong) and lifelong bachelor Woo-sik (Jang Yong) both make ends meet by collecting cardboard for recycling, and they meet while fighting over discarded boxes next to a sidewalk vegetable stand run by Hwa-jin (Ye Soo-jeong). That conflict soon turns to friendship, as the trio bonds over their shared isolation and lack of funds. They make up for their financial shortcomings by dining and dashing at barbecue restaurants, which gives them the kind of exhilaration they thought was long gone. The meals are a pretext for the characters to get to know each other, and the movie falters a bit when it leaves that structure behind for a sentimental final act, but the performances keep it grounded in an honest portrayal of growing old. Grade: B
Relentless (VOD January 9): It’s a shame that this thriller doesn’t live up to its title, because there’s a certain excitement to watching the two main characters chase and pummel each other without any information on who they are or why they’re doing it. That excitement lasts only a brief time, before writer-director Tom Botchii slows the plot down to a crawl and delivers long expository scenes of homeless vigilante Teddy (Jeffrey Decker) and tech worker Jun (Shuhei Kinoshita) arguing over the reasons for their mutual animosity. The backstory isn’t nearly interesting enough for Botchii to spend so long teasing it out, and he eventually relies on dubious understandings of both identity theft and institutional racism. The infrequent bursts of action following the propulsive opening aren’t nearly enough to make up for the tedious didacticism, overstated performances, and repetitive posturing, including dozens of moments of Teddy angstily lighting up cigarettes. The artsy slow-mo shots accompanied by a droning score do a poor job of standing in for anything meaningful. Grade: C-
Sleepwalker (VOD and select theaters January 9): Hayden Panettiere sleepwalks through this derivative horror movie as a traumatized artist trying to move on from her abusive husband and the death of her young daughter in a car accident. Writer-director Brandon Auman holds back key details for the sake of some cheap twists as Sarah (Panettiere) is tormented by nightmares, seemingly orchestrated by her diabolical ex Michael (Justin Chatwin), who may have developed Freddy Krueger-like abilities while in a coma. There are some creepy nightmare images, but Auman undermines the suspense with constant fakeouts as Sarah wakes up from apparent danger. Chatwin and Beverly D’Angelo (as Sarah’s exasperated mother) give similarly bored performances, and the movie only perks up during a short sequence featuring Lori Tann Chin as a sardonic exorcist. The rest of Sleepwalker is entirely humorless, a rote facsimile of the kind of B-level studio horror movies Panettiere and Chatwin could have appeared in when they were hot young stars. There’s nothing here that warrants staying awake, for the actors or the audience. Grade: C-
Tapped (VOD January 9): Maybe there are good intentions behind this misguided combination of working-class drama and revenge thriller, but they’re tough to discern amid the muddled plotting and simplistic portrayal of mental illness. Co-writer Elijah Baker plays a young man everyone calls Nuro, in reference to his unspecified neurodivergent condition. He’s just barely able to live on his own, in a rundown apartment building where he’s surrounded by menacing thugs. After a group of those gangsters rape Nuro’s autistic friend Clara (Vianne Furey), he uses the moves he’s learned from obsessively watching martial-arts movies to take them out. That could be the formula for a fun (if possibly problematic) B-movie, but director and co-writer Teoman Sayin plays things disappointingly straight, often detouring into heavy-handed PSA territory. Numerous dead-end subplots distract from the potential satisfaction of seeing Nuro enact his revenge, which Sayin depicts in sporadic, clumsy fight scenes. The movie sacrifices gritty realism for kung-fu combat, but doesn’t succeed in either area. Grade: C
