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It occasionally slips my mind just how dreadful it can get. I view an appropriate amount of B-horror and it appears that, over time, my floor has plummeted to an unfathomable chasm. Then a movie comes along and hits me all at once like a bucket of ice cold water. Enter Richard Grieco, yes that Richard Grieco, and Steve Stanulis 2019 Clinton Road: a shadow of a film Now ‘a shadow of a film’ evokes imagery and if I were to use it in description of a good movie, perhaps some 16mm work of the 1970s procured from Canyon Cinema at a nominal fee, this would certainly be an attention grabbing description. But instead I’m talking about a really shitty horror film that manages to do very little work outside of riling us up along with Eric Roberts in what is potentially the most useless scene in the annals of cinema history. So there is that.
In Clinton Road, ghostly killers appear in the latter half, a goggle wearing, hammer wielding brute, and a ghost girl with a teddy bear. Imagine a ‘horror on a budget’ kinda movie. Actors in this B movie frantically try to make sense of a bad script. When the movie finally ends, you where dozed off and realized you had just wasted 90 minutes of your life. Creepy, right? Now, let’s detail the ‘plot’. There’s a woman who vanished in rural northeastern part of New Jersey. Fast forward, and her sibling and medium try to search for her. Without coherent reasoning they keep bumping into the dark spirits at the New Jersey site.
As for the film itself, the production values are not particularly amazing, and the technical aspects are not the problem. The issues here stem from the ridiculous script and the poorly executed storytelling. The plot is thin, but it does have some potential, and that potential is quickly squandered once the dialogue begins. From the first round of introductions, it is painfully obvious that the filmmakers have little experience imagining other people’s lives. There is a “hippy woman”, who is supposed to be a hippy but in reality is just like everyone else, the self-centered, shallow wife of the kidnapped woman’s husband who is literally a mean girl caricature, and then there is the protagonist who, I’m sorry, what are her virtues again? Oh yes, she is just not one of them. That’s all. It is excruciating.
This film’s misplaced attempts at external coherence, such as following a character and their motivations for a few beats, are quite impressive indeed; however, this does not, unfortunately, extend to the mystery at hand. Clinton Road consists of many horror film tropes stitched together with no context whatsoever. Prior to falling into unnatural (for a low-budget production like this) Halloween Horror Nights sub-genre, there is one slightly positive aspect – the film is briefly enjoyable. Our crew of characters meet at an artistically snowy Manhattan nightclub to set the film’s plot. It is astonishingly amusing. For one thing, the film’s rendering of a style club lets the students’ imagination run wild. The lights are essentially galactic, the walls displaying laser jet printed mock coffee shop art are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s ridiculously funny, and that’s pretty fun. An ice T grasps the, or rather is the, owner of this bar who is none other than the immortal turned UV TV legal pimps. He tries to make the only intelligent comment which somehow exists in the homeland of stupidity. The joy of the filmmakers gives stigma in the direction of Ice T. They have likely managed to gather enough dirt on this star to blackmail him into a one day appearance while standing behind a bar/coffee house with curtains over the windows. The man we all know as Ice T is the actor who so quickly to escape, leaving behind any shroud of goodness this movie possesses.
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