S.I.C.K. aka Grim Weekend (2003) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

SPOILERS:

This film is also known as Serial Insane Clown Killer

Actually he's not a clown killer. He's a killer clown. I would have preferred the former, but SIKC wasn't a very meaningful acronym, so ...

It is an ultra low budget movie of the "young adults stuck in a remote cabin with an insane cannibal killer lurking in the woods" type, kind of a Friday the 13th meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Cabin Fever kind of film, which brought exactly one fresh element to the genre - a really tricky ending that caught me by surprise, kind of like the finale of The Game. Since I have seen hundreds of similar films, it's not easy for me to be surprised, so I appreciated the offbeat twist, but there was a major problem: when you review the film in your mind, or watch it a second time knowing the surprise, as I did, you realize that the "surprise" plot twist is not possible!

No wonder it was a surprise.

The idea was that the guy who owned the cabin brought people out there on the pretext of a relaxing weekend in the countryside, then turned them over to the insane locals to be used as sacrifices, then cannibalized.

Par-TAY!!!

(In the epilogue, we see the cabin owner invite some real assholes from work, including the resident office "Lumburgh".)

But ... looking back on it ... how could they have been conspiring?

• The Runaway. Looking at the film again from the beginning, once concludes that she could not have been in cahoots with the cabin owner, as revealed later. The campers only picked the runaway up from the roadhouse because of something the other two (non-conspiratorial) women decided between them. The innocent women insisted on taking the runaway along - AGAINST the objections of the guy she was supposed to be in cahoots with. OK, you can say he was just acting when he refused to take her, but the problem is that he did nothing at all to push the others into taking the girl along. It was their idea. The "innocent" people made the decision entirely on their own.

• The Insane Clown. We see the cabin owner shoot at the clown with real bullets. We know the bullets are real because they nearly destroy the cabin door. We know that the clown is behind the door when the shots are fired. We see the shooting from the gunman's POV, so he knows no more than we do about the clown's precise location behind an opaque door. It was only luck that kept the clown from being killed. So how could the guy with the gun and the clown have been in cahoots?

There were some other inconsistencies as well, but those were the key ones. So, the great plot twist didn't really hold up well in light of previous developments in the film. It came as a surprise partially because it was illogical, which is a totally dishonest way to generate a surprise.

But do you know what? Overall, it wasn't a bad script. They made it more fun by complicating it with ruses and games, like some dolls, one for each victim, whose gradually disappearing body parts reflected the status of the corresponding victims. The best scene came at the end, when the intended victim got control of the gun and "killed" the cabin owner - until he stood up and said to the Insane Clown, "see, I told you she had the guts to pull the trigger", and we find that he had swapped the bullets for blanks.

Yes, I think the script was fun. It could have made for a pretty good genre film in the hands of professionals. That didn't happen. The director didn't do such a bad job with a zero budget, but when push came to shove he had insufficient resources to establish the shots and atmosphere he needed to make it all come together. He still might have snuck it through as a workable cheapie, except that the actors were all amateurs, and they just couldn't make it work.