#splatstick

I wish he was a larger part of this movie ok?

GROOVY

Review - Destroy All Neighbors (2024)

Revolving around two things many of us know all too well, neighbours from hell and writer’s block, Destroy All Neighbors is a wonderfully over the top exercise in splatstick.

I have developed parasocial relationships with several of the key collaborators behind the retro splatstick comedy Destroy All Neighbors, which has me rooting for its success.  I met one of the film’s writers, Charles Pieper, at a local horror festival a few years ago, and we established one of the most sacred bonds two people can share: social media mutuals.  The film’s score was also…

The thing that makes all of this work (except for the female characters only existing to be assaulted for shock value - nothing good comes from that) is Jeffery Combs. Amid all of the weird, cartoonish chaos going on in the prison, he plays the character extremely well and knocks it out of the park. The result is the same Herb West everybody loves juxtaposed with all this bullshit, which is hilarious. It’s just cartoon gore and over the top acting and West doing mad science like ‘whatever I’ve seen all this before.’ He just doesn’t react to most of it and his most extreme reaction is an eyebrow raise. 

God Can't Save You Now: a Re-Animator/Evil Dead Mix

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) ★★★★★ · Rewatched Oct 4, 2025

Killer Klowns from Outer Space is a wild mix of horror, comedy, and genuinely unsettling moments. It’s an entry in what Peter Jackson coined the “splatstick” subgenre—horror comedies where violence and gore are treated the way anvils and mallets or pies and banana peels are in old school comedy shorts, both animated and live-action.

Killer Klowns fully leans into that Looney Tunes-style chaos. The violence is surreal, funny and over-the-top, yet the film still lands genuinely creepy moments, like the police chief’s corpse being turned into a ventriloquist’s puppet to mock a heroic cop. That balance of silliness and terror is what keeps the movie from feeling like a flat-out parody.

Beyond the surface-level humor and shock value, the film remains fascinating because of the murky motives of the clowns. They kill most of the humans they encounter and feed on their victims’ blood, yet there are moments that complicate their behavior. The female love interest is kidnapped rather than killed, and the only two female clowns are implied to have a sexual encounter with the comic-relief duo—and then let them go.

Are these clowns trying to create a slave race, exploiting humans not just as food, but also as entertainment (given the over-the-top methods they use to hunt and kill them), and also perhaps for other, more perverse desires? A question perhaps more unsettling than anything in the surface narrative.

RE-ANIMATOR (1985)