100 Tears (2007)

Reviewed by Johnny Butane

Starring Raine Brown, Joe Davison, Georgia Chris, Jack Amos

Directed by Marcus Koch

Here’s one I had been hearing about for a while, mainly thanks to the film’s producer, sometimes Andres Schnass screenwriter and all around sexy beast, Ted Geoghegan (also former webmaster of Diabolical Dominion). He would send me updates now and then with new pics of a clown holding a giant, and I mean giant, meat cleaver and I couldn’t help but wonder; “What the hell is Ted doing now?”

The answer is he was helping director Marcus Koch (also head of Oddtopsy FX Group) bring his vision of a psychopathic, silent clown killer who has no remorse or anything close to human feelings, to the screen. The result is at times genuinely funny, outright ridiculous, painfully bad, and screamingly entertaining.

Not bad for a sophomore effort, eh?

The story, what there is of it, follows two reporters, Mark (Davison) and Jennifer (Chris). They work for a tabloid called The Midnight Sun, and both are pretty sick of reporting on alien babies and transvestite Bigfoots, Jennifer especially. She begins looking into the stories about the infamous Teardrop Killer, who’s been making mincemeat out of anyone he comes across for 20 years (!) and still the police have no clue who this guy is. Very hard to believe when he’s in action, cause he’s not what one would call “stealth”.

They begin looking into his history just as ole’ Teary lays waste to all the denizens of a halfway house in one night. Why? Much like Mt. Everest, because they were there. The duo listen to what seems to be the only eyewitness left alive, who said the killer was dressed as a clown and pretty soon they’re at the bottom of the mystery.

The plot is where the both the outright ridiculous and painfully bad come into play. It’s pieced together with nary a though for reality; it seems like it’s there only to give their main attraction more reason to kill. Messily. Which, believe me, he does plenty of.

This is where the screamingly entertaining part comes in; Watching this slightly overweight clown slice and dice kids twice (and half) his size never gets old. Every time that huge cleaver is swung something comes off; heads, arms, legs, and it’s always followed by fountains of the red stuff. You can tell Koch got his start working with Schnaas, as well, because the kill scenes are staged alike, though these look a helluva lot more realistic.

The choreography, for one thing, is leaps and bounds what you usually see in indie films. You can tell some time was spent blocking these fight scenes out to make them look as real as possible, no matter how ridiculous the circumstance, which only added to the fun already being had watching the Gurdy the Clown slice ‘n dice.

One other positive I want to make sure I mention, because really what there is bad to say about this movie can be said about pretty much any first or second time feature, is the man known as Joe Davison. He turns in a very realistic, believable turn as Mark; a guy who really wants to be way cooler than he is and won’t admit he’s madly in love with Jennifer. The great thing about the love story angle here is that it’s very subtle, never actually brought up other than to point out that they’re both single, which makes their interaction that much more believable.

And man, Georgia Chris is in no way, shape or form hard on the eyes, so that helps make this unrequited love that much more plausible. No offense to Davison if he reads this.

At the end of the day, 100 Tears is a movie that you really need to see with a crowd, at a festival, and perhaps with a few drinks in your. It does slow down a few too many times, and as I said some of the plot holes are big enough to drive through, but there’s just too much fun to be had watching a clown murder people like it’s going out of style. And it doesn’t hurt that Raine Brown is in a button down shirt and underwear for the entire movie, either.

3 out of 5

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