Amusement (film)

Amusement
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	John Simpson
Produced by	Neal Edelstein Merideth Finn Mike Macari Udi Nedivi
Written by	Jake Wade Wall
Starring	Keir O'Donnell Katheryn Winnick Laura Breckenridge Jessica Lucas
Music by	Marco Beltrami
Cinematography	Mark Garrett
Edited by	Chris Willingham David Handman
Production company	Picturehouse Entertainment
Distributed by	New Line Cinema
Release date	October 9, 2008 (2008-10-09) (Thailand) January 20, 2009 (2009-01-20) (United States)
Running time	85 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$10 million
Box office	$170,255[1]

Amusement is a 2008 American anthology horror film directed by John Simpson and starring Katheryn Winnick, Laura Breckenridge and Jessica Lucas. The film went direct-to-video in January 2009. It was the last film to be distributed by Picturehouse Entertainment before their closure in 2008 and relaunch in 2013.

Plot

The opening credits features the pictures and records of three girls — Tabitha Wright, Lisa Swan, and Shelby Leds — who are all successful and exemplary students from childhood to adulthood, as well as the medical records of an unidentified young man, whose records describe him as psychologically disturbed, dangerous, and is therefore detained. What follows is three separate narratives of what happened to the young women.

Shelby

Shelby and her boyfriend Rob are on the highway joined by a convoy of vehicles consisting of a semi-truck and a Jeep. The convoy decides to pull over for gas and Shelby sees a frightened woman in the back window of the semi, though Rob does not see it and tells her that the semi driver said he was driving alone. On the road, Shelby sees the same girl on the window, followed by a paper that came from the semi saying "Help Me". Moments later, the girl jumps from the semi and lands on their car. The semi continues to drive as Rob, Shelby and the driver of the Jeep stop to help the girl. Rob drives away after Shelby tells him to get the semi driver's plates.

Rob fails to catch the semi driver, and upon his return discover the Jeep driver injured and Shelby and the woman missing. The driver of the Jeep says that semi driver took them, and they take the Jeep to an old, isolated house. The Jeep driver goes alone to the front door, where he overhears the semi driver talking on the phone. It is implied that the semi driver is the woman's father, and that the woman is a drug addict whom he was taking to a rehabilitation facility.

Meanwhile, in the Jeep, Rob discovers Shelby and the woman under the tarp in the backseat, bound and gagged. The Jeep driver kills the semi driver when he goes out, having noticed the Jeep outside, and approaches the Jeep with a maniacal laugh. Rob locks the door and tries to drive away, only to discover that the keys are missing. To Rob's horror, the driver of the Jeep holds up the keys outside his window. He then breaks open the window with his sledgehammer.

Tabitha

Tabitha is spending the night in her aunt's house to babysit her cousins, Max and Danny. She finds out that their babysitter, June, had already left, though she was supposed to wait for Tabitha to arrive before leaving. Later that evening, a man whose face is covered by a hooded raincoat claims to be June's boyfriend, Owen, who is looking for her since she missed cheerleading practice. Tabitha tells him she does not know where June is, and he leaves. While exploring the house, Tabitha is unnerved by the guest bedroom, which is decorated with clown toys, and is particularly scared of a life-sized clown doll sitting on the rocking chair. The television in the room turns on, and she finds the remote control on the clown's lap. She goes to sleep, but is awoken by the thunderstorm. Unknown to her, the clown's head turns to look at her.

Her aunt calls in the middle of the night, checking on the children. Tabitha assures her they are fine, but expresses her discomfort on the life-sized clown. Her aunt tells her that they have no life-sized doll just as the doll stands up and walk towards her. Tabitha turns around and sees the chair is empty. Terrified, she runs to her cousins' room, locks the door, and tells the boys to hide. The boys insist that it is only Owen, who wants to play. However, the clown stabs the door with a spike, nearly hitting Tabitha. She helps them escape through the window to look for help before she is attacked by the clown. She manages to escape as well, hiding in the shed. She opens the closet and finds June's corpse. The clown enters the room, his laughter similar to the Jeep driver's.

The scene cuts to Tabitha in a police interrogation room. In shock, she does not answer any of the interrogator's questions, and he leaves her alone. Tabitha has a flashback of when she, Shelby, and Lisa were children in Briar Hills Elementary tasked to design a shoe box which is viewed through a peephole. A male classmate demands to see their work before he shows his. He claims all their work is boring and shows his to Tabitha. She is clearly horrified, and he asks, "It's funny, right?". She replies it isn't, and the three girls leave him. It is revealed that the boy chained up a rat and pulled back its skin to reveal its organs.

Lisa

Lisa is with her boyfriend Dan looking for her roommate Cat, who had disappeared during a party the night before. They go to an old hotel that Cat said she will be at. Lisa tries to get in, but the caretaker, a man whose face is covered by a face mask, refuses to let her in. She convinces Dan to pose as a health inspector and look inside. The caretaker shows Dan a music player, claiming there is a surprise in the end. Dan plays with it, and a knife flies out of the speaker, stabbing him in the eye.

With no word from Dan, Lisa sneaks in the house and enters a room filled with beds. She meets an apparently deaf man who leads her to another room filled with beds where dead bodies are stuffed into the mattresses. She finds Cat stuffed in one mattress, but still finds her alive. Cat, gagged, is yelling incoherent words at Lisa, busy trying to free Cat. We see that Cat was trying to warn her about the deaf man slowly approaching her, revealing to be the killer.

The Briar Hills Connection: The Final Confrontation

Back at the interrogation room, Tabitha is interrogated again, this time by a therapist who asks her about her friend Shelby. Tabitha says that they were all good friends in Briar Hills Elementary but have not met in years. The therapist remembers a patient she once had who was a young boy from Briar Hills, and then abruptly hurries out of the room. She tells Tabitha that Lisa and Shelby are also here, and she will be back after she finds "a phone that works." Tabitha finds the door unlocked and discovers that she is not in a police station as she initially assumed. She finds the therapist dead on the floor, and sees the first officer approaching. He begins to laugh and she realizes he was the killer, and she flees.

Tabitha runs to the basement, where she finds herself trapped between two glass walls. Beyond either side, she finds Lisa and Shelby, bound and gagged and their abdomen's skin sliced open similar to the rat in the boy's box. The killer initially taunts them, but then shows Tabitha that the two girls are virtually unharmed, and that their 'opened-skin' is a trick. Just as he is about to harm Shelby for real, Tabitha pretends to laugh. He opens the glass walls and approaches her, and Tabitha stabs him in the neck with a scalpel she had hidden earlier. She unties her friends and they escape.

Lisa opens the wrong door and is killed by the man. Tabitha and Shelby climb a ladder, but Shelby and the man fall to the bottom when he grabs her ankle. Tabitha climbs to the top, only to find the elevator being called from the bottom and realizes he is alive and coming. She hides in what appears to be a closet with props used to kidnap the three of them as well as the dead bodies of other people he had murdered. The killer surprises her as he looks through the peep hole. It is revealed she is in the back of a truck, and they are in the first house at the beginning of the movie. After he drives a short distance, the truck stalls. Tabitha takes hold one of the spiked handles and, when he returns to look at the peep hole again, stabs him through the face, killing him and remarking: "Now that was funny."

The truck drives away, with Tabitha talking about how she and her friends had laughed at him when they were kids, thinking that he was a joke. And that after he was sent away, they had forgotten him, but he never forgot them. The film ends with her remarking that even though it's all over, she still cannot get his laugh out of her head. And his laugh is heard.

Cast

Production

The film was produced by Macari/Edelstein, New Line Cinema and Picturehouse Entertainment.

Release

The film was originally slated to hit theaters in January 2008, but was pushed back to April 25 and then again to September 12. It was pushed back once more to December 26, but Warner Bros. ultimately decided to release it direct-to-video on January 20, 2009.^[2] It was released on DVD in Australia on February 5, 2009^[3] and on March 23, 2009 in the United Kingdom.^[4]

Release dates

• October 9: Thailand (Theatrical)
• November 7: Taiwan (Theatrical)
• January 20: United States (DVD)
• February 5: Australia (DVD)
• March 23: United Kingdom (DVD)
• August 25: France (DVD)

Reception

Bloody-Disgusting.com apparently caught an early screening of the film and called it "disastrous",^[5] which might be one of the reasons why the theatrical release has been delayed so much and the eventual decision to release it direct-to-video instead.^[6]

References

External links

• Amusement
• Amusement at AllMovie
• Amusement on IMDb
• Amusement at Rotten Tomatoes
• AMC