Final Screening Review: Killjoy (2000)

Angel Vargas brings chaos and charisma to the title role in Killjoy (2000), the cult urban horror film from Full Moon Pictures.

FINAL SCREENING: The Rare Reviews Countdown

Welcome to FINAL SCREENING, Horror Movies Uncut’s rare reviews countdown celebrating the season of fear. Each night leading up to Halloween, we’re revisiting films that slipped through the cracks — titles that never found the spotlight, disappeared after their release, or were simply too strange for their time. These are the misfits, the buried treasures, the experiments that deserve one more chance under the projector’s glow. Join us from October 13th through Halloween as we dig deep into cinema’s forgotten nightmares, one screening at a time.

Final Screening Review: Killjoy (2000)

If Candyman is the godfather of urban horror, then Killjoy is the cousin who lives down the block — the one you know about, but maybe don’t want to talk about. Directed by Craig Ross Jr. and released on October 24, 2000, Killjoy arrived during the height of the direct-to-video boom, a time when indie filmmakers were fighting for shelf space in the aisles of Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. Shot for around $150,000 and distributed by Full Moon Pictures, the film wears its low-budget chaos proudly.

Revisiting Killjoy in 2024 feels like cracking open a VHS time capsule. It’s clunky, unpolished, often absurd — but also fascinating. The premise, centering on a murdered young man who returns as a vengeful clown spirit, might sound silly on paper, but beneath the neon makeup and budget effects lies a slice of early-2000s horror that dared to center Black characters and urban myth in a genre space that rarely welcomed either.

Full Moon Pictures, best known for Puppet Master and Demonic Toys, was experimenting with an “urban renewal” of horror during this era — a response to the success of Bones and the growing audience for Black-led horror storytelling. In that context, Killjoy wasn’t just another straight-to-video freak show; it was a cultural mutation. A B-movie oddity trying to fuse the hood horror aesthetic with supernatural vengeance and a bit of clown terror for good measure.

As bad as it is — and let’s be clear, Killjoy is bad — there’s something weirdly endearing about its ambition. Angel Vargas’ take on Killjoy is manic and unhinged, with a grin that lingers somewhere between menacing and meme-worthy. The film’s setting — an ice cream truck turned otherworldly death trap — feels oddly prophetic, especially with modern horror’s return to grimy, surreal environments. Even Eli Roth’s upcoming Ice Cream Man movie feels like it owes a quiet nod to this DIY nightmare.

What’s more surprising is how Killjoy endured. The film spawned multiple sequels — Killjoy 2: Deliver Us from Evil, Killjoy 3, Killjoy Goes to Hell, and Killjoy’s Psycho Circus — each more chaotic than the last. Somewhere along the line, the franchise changed hands and lost its original urban flavor, swapping out its Black cast and tone for something whiter and more cartoonish. But that first film, as rough and uneven as it is, remains a snapshot of something special: a Black horror vision made during a time when almost no one was greenlighting them.

Like the best cult films, Killjoy endures because it exists at all. It’s a weird, broken little artifact that represents a lineage of independent Black horror that deserves more recognition — from Tales from the Hood to Bones to today’s indie resurgence.

So yeah, it’s terrible. But it’s ours.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)

Terrible, endearing, and necessary — Killjoy remains a strange cornerstone in the history of urban horror.