Stitches

A COMEDY HORROR THAT WILL NOT HAVE YOU IN STITCHES

Starring: Ross Noble, Tommy Knight, Eoghan McQuinn

Genre: Comedy/Horror

Geordie comedian Ross Noble makes his film debut in Stitches, a comedy horror detailing the story of a downbeat clown named Stitches as he seeks revenge after being killed at a children’s party. Six years later, Stitches returns from the grave to murder the children he blames for his gruesome death. 

The story centres on Tom (Tommy Knight) and his annoying school friends as he organises a house party in attempt to woo the girl of his dreams. Unluckily for them, a stray flyer advertising the party just so happens to land on the grave of Stitches the clown, subsequently resurrecting him from the dead. Stupid? Ludicrous? Yes, and it gets worse. The house party is a classic horror plot device; however, this typically American cliché doesn’t exactly work in a film set in a small Irish town. The mainly teenage cast is another typical horror feature, yet the film tries too hard to create comical characters and ends up coming across as a poor Inbetweeners rip-off. The characters, which include the stereotypes of the laddish sex pest and the fat camp guy, lacked enough depth even to fulfil the most basic horror roles, and were too typical for anyone other than particularly immature adolescent boys to find them funny.

With an age 18 certificate, Stitches really does seem to be aimed at the wrong audience. The 18 age limit suggests, misleadingly, a frightening, creepy gore fest as opposed to a film reminiscent of a poor BBC 3 comedy. And I use the term comedy very loosely; Stitches’ main problem is that it never really fits into the horror or the comedy genre, failing spectacularly to be either scary or funny. The character of Stitches the clown has very few lines, meaning the talents of comedian Ross Noble were greatly wasted. Noble’s comedic skills were limited to shouting “bastard” in a Bolton accent whilst riding a tricycle. Perhaps the film’s lowest points were the puns Noble utters after murdering each teen. Although the writers of these cringeworthy ‘jokes’ clearly knew they were bad, a self awareness of a bad joke does not make it any funnier, and the puns added nothing to an already poor script.

Another issue with the film is that the plot didn’t really make sense. The whole story centred around Stitches’ vengeance on the children who murdered him, yet, well, he was never really murdered in the first place. Additionally, Noble’s character is initially presented as depressed and somewhat unstable, yet his transformation into a psychopathic murderer is far from a smooth transition, and the character’s story appears to have been overlooked by the filmmakers. Throughout the film Noble has the difficult job of trying to scare and to amuse simultaneously. The character of Stitches never managed to frighten, and since clowns are creepy anyway, the filmmakers have failed at a very easy job. Death scenes, you would imagine, are another thing which are difficult to get wrong. The ludicrous murders, which included inflating a teenagers’ head with a balloon pump, again were neither horrific nor funny, their only purpose to be the feed lines to Noble’s dire puns.

With a running time of only 86 minutes, the film is in fact short yet it feels so much longer. Overall, the plot was terrible, the script was appalling and the acting was abysmal. Lines were delivered poorly and some performances, notably the performance of the female lead, made a bad film even worse. Stitches struggled to fit into any category, and probably struggles to appeal to any audiences, the scariest thing about the film being the fact that it was ever made.

Summary: Difficult to watch for all the wrong reasons. Give it a miss.

VERDICT: 2/10