As horror tributes go, Stitches gleefully inflates all the familiar blood packets. That’s the fucking problem. Despite opening, literally, with a bang to show off the wretched lifestyle of a clown (Ross Noble) who lives in a trailer on the edge of a cliff, lots of high school partying, snarky one-liners, and a firm mockery of everything wrong with cheap 80′s slasher flicks, the movie feels castrated by its loyalty to formula. But, do we have fun? Yes! The little bastards (as Stitches calls all children) he is paid to entertain accidentally impale him through the face twice. Then, at the clown’s funeral, Tom (Tommy Knight) witnesses a group of mage-like clowns performing a ritual. They curse Tom and his friends for not letting a clown finish his party.
6 years later, Tom is still traumatized from witnessing the death of Stitches, and his friends are a typical bunch of dick swinging party boys. It is not long before they throw a huge party, which brings Stitches back to life. He takes off his red clown-nose and throws it so that it can sniff out the little bastards that killed him. Meanwhile, the kids are drinking, eating marijuana cookies, and using yo’ momma cut-downs to fill in the spaces between over-the-top murders. Conor McMahon deserves credit for getting the best out of his young, unknown victims, but they may just be playing themselves. At one point, Stitches uses a blender to brain screw a teen, but nothing in the film tops the balloon death. The sequence is laugh out loud schlock of the highest caliber that, for some, is worth the 86 minutes of build-up.
For everyone else, Stitches is a formulaic homage to what we’ve all seen before from the likes of Chucky, Jason, Night of the Demons, and any other blood-splattered affair from the days of yore.
