Verdict
Summary
I didn’t like The Jester for a lot of reasons. There’s not much of a story, and there’s not nearly as much gore or mayhem as there are in the Terrifier movies (how I despise them), but basically it just doesn’t make sense to me. Oh, and it’s set on Halloween, but for what purpose? To give The Jester – this guy who walks around in a mask and can be seen by anyone – a free hallway pass? That’s thin, man. There’s no spirit of Halloween at all to this movie, and so why even bother?
Plot:
A supernatural prankster destroys lives for the hell of it.
Review:
A man named John (Matt Servitto) is walking at night, and he knows he’s being followed. We watch him try to make a desperate phone call to his estranged daughter, whom he is apparently trying to amends with, but it’s all for nothing: She rejects him, and the person following him seems … disappointed. The person following him is billed as The Jester (Michael Sheffield), a malevolent goofball with a grim looking mask with a rictus grin on it. The Jester then proceeds to kill John in an elaborate and outlandish (and totally impossible) way, which begs the question that never gets answered in the film that follows: Who or what is The Jester and what gives him his powers?
Here’s the thing about horror movies: You usually know what sort of world the film is set in. The real world can be inhabited by all the killers they can think up – Leatherface, Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, or whoever. Even the freaking Leprechaun or The Tall Man. These movies tend to establish the monster and abide by the rules they create. That’s why A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is the wackiest one; it broke its own rules, but by part 3, the rules were reestablished. Sometimes horror movies are totally impossible to believe, but at least most of the time they have rules. Even Sharknado tries to set rules with wonky science and the bending and breaking of physics. But a movie like The Jester has no rules. And my guess is because it feels directly inspired by another even worse offender of a horror film: Terrifier and its sequel Terrifier 2. The ghoulish clown / jester in those is Art the Clown, a demonic creature that delights in mutilating and killing innocent people. There are no rules set by the filmmakers for those films: Art is a curse, a disease and cannot be stopped no matter what. If he’s onto you, it’s curtains. Same thing with The Jester, but The Jester is even more baffling because he never feels like he’s in our world. He can make your teeth disappear! He can make your eyes disappear! Oh, hey: He can make your head disappear! Poof! He’s magic! He sort of behaves like Art the Clown, but he seems to communicate differently, but just like Art, he’s a curse, and there’s no shaking him. In horror movies like Smile and It Follows, the curse sort of makes sense. It’s not really what follows you, but how to transfer the curse away from you. Those movies, therefore, have a set of rules.
Characters can see The Jester just like they can Art the Clown. These guys are prowling around, looking to cause mischief. But they can’t be stopped. There is only going to be more of the same method of mayhem the more the filmmakers choose to keep their exploits going. But I don’t understand the appeal of these guys at all: They don’t make sense, and they only seem to exist to perpetuate the act of horror. In that sense, they’re visceral imps without any kind of logic. As a fan of horror, I find these guys (especially Art the Clown) imbecilic and beyond the realm of reason. They not only don’t make sense, but they don’t inspire any sense of fear simply because they’re based on an idea that has no core beyond the obvious: Just because.
I didn’t like The Jester for a lot of reasons. There’s not much of a story, and there’s not nearly as much gore or mayhem as there are in the Terrifier movies (how I despise them), but basically it just doesn’t make sense to me. Oh, and it’s set on Halloween, but for what purpose? To give The Jester – this guy who walks around in a mask and can be seen by anyone – a free hallway pass? That’s thin, man. There’s no spirit of Halloween at all to this movie, and so why even bother?
Written and directed by Colin Krawchuk.
Epic / Dread recently put out a Blu-ray edition of The Jester. Also included on the disc are several short films with The Jester character (yay?), the trailer, and some bonus Dread trailers.
