Stream It or Skip It?

This week on Blatantly Obvious Holiday Counterprogramming Theatre is The Jester 2 (now on Shudder), a gory cheapo-creepster that really puts the TURGE in TURGID. Filmmaker Colin Krawchuk launched the franchise with a trio of YouTube shorts about a clown-masked trickster magician who isn’t very nice to people, then spun the idea into a 2023 feature, and then this sequel. The reference point here is the Terrifier series, whose nasty, iconic (but only to horror movie sickos) villain Art the Clown and his wordless pantomime murderousness is a clear and obvious inspiration for the Jester. The Terrifier films are pointlessly brutal, and Krawchuk manages to avoid that brand of off-putting nastiness. The problem is, The Jester films counter that by being more boring than a drill press.

THE JESTER 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: It’s Halloween night, so nobody bats an eye at the guy with the bizarre jester mask and grimy taffeta suit sauntering around in a top hat and cane. In the opening sequence, he pulls quite the maneuver when he tosses a cape over a hapless dolt and makes him disappear – then reappear on a noose, swapped out for a pinata that a bunch of drunk teenagers were taking turns whacking. Drunk teenagers who are so drunk, they don’t notice they’re crunching real bones with a bat until the camera reveals the body. Because apparently, like us, they can only see what’s in the frame. If you can swallow this slopass logic, god bless ye and godspeed on to the “plot” part of the movie, which makes a sad and pathetic attempt to build a mythology around the Jester character (Michael Sheffield).

It begins with a 15-year-old girl named Max (Kaitlyn Trentham), who happens to be really into close-up magic. She made her own top hat and cape and is all ready to go trick-or-treating with her kid sister when her shitty shitty mom (Jessica Ambuehl) treats her like shit and makes her feel dumb for being 15 and still wanting to go trick-or-treating. So Max gets left behind, prompting her to hop on her bike and pedal to a restaurant for no reason other than so she can be in the crosshairs of some bully teenagers she apparently knows from school or whatever, the type of asshairs who point and laugh at a girl who sits all by herself in a homemade top hat. But soon she’s not alone in the booth, as the Jester drops by to show her a card trick, which she’s too smart to be fooled by. Hmm. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t kill her in gruesome fashion, like that poor rando on the street in a previous scene.

Max’s only refuge is at the local magic shop, run by a kind gent named Willie (Dingani Beza), who helps repair her bike tire after the asshairs slash it. She hops on her bike to head home and there’s the Jester again. He can manifest wherever the plot needs him to be, which is very convenient. He’s very tricky – you can be hiding under a truck and staring at his feet but the rest of his body can grab you from behind. HOW does he do that? Magic, duh! Using Max’s rescue inhaler as leverage – see, Max starts hyperventilating whenever the plot needs her to, which is another variation on magic – the Jester kinda talks her into being his familiar of sorts, and if you’re wondering how he talks when he’s a perma-mime, well, it’s a bit convoluted and maybe a spoiler, but it’s not a spoiler to say that’s magic too. This exposition-dump part of the movie takes roughly three days to get through, which is wild, since the run time is only 87 minutes. Magic – it’s EVERYWHERE!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The Jester makes Clown in a Cornfield look like The Searchers. It also makes me want to make the fourth magic-based film in a series, Now You See Me Watch Anything But This.

Performance Worth Watching: I hate to criticize actors forced to slog it through a putrid screenplay. But man, I’ve seen better performances from mall-boutique mannequins. 

Sex And Skin: None. Remember when slasher movies were fun because they were skeevy exercises in exploitation? Me too.

Our Take: It is a truth universally acknowledged that movies are incredibly difficult to make. Well, here’s proof! The Jester 2 is a completed film with a beginning, middle and end, with some credits. That alone is a monumental task, and Crawchuk has achieved what many of us haven’t. That doesn’t mean the finished product is at all watchable, mind you. It’s paced like a snail in a salt mine. Half the movie passes before we get to any semblance of plot, and then, it’s a stultifying exposition dump. And it’s populated with mindless dolts who sit patiently and allow the Jester to do his little softshoe magician sleight-of-hand gestures as he does nasty things to them. 

I can already hear the praise for the film’s use of ooey-gooey in-camera effects, but that only goes so far when there’s no spark of energy to be found. Scenes linger for minutes past their capacity for drama, and the few stabs at comedy are fruitless, hapless, hopeless. The cinematography is clean and crisp when a smudge of grime on the lens might give the film something resembling visual character. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE KILLS, the horror sickos (you, as ever, know who you are) will ask. Well, they’re fine, just fine, although some find the Jester essentially going hocus pocus now your guts fall out, with little flair or logistical sense. While watching The Jester 2, I wanted to cast a spell and make myself disappear.

Our Call: More like abracaBADra, right? SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.