Jitters, 2026.
Directed by Marc Zammit.
Starring Fabrizio Santino, Anto Sharp, Jessica Impiazzi, Boo Miller, Ritchi Edwards, Lauren Budd, Adrian Derrick-Palmer, and Daniel Jordan.
SYNOPSIS:
Detective Collymore, a single divorced father, stumbles upon a mysterious case involving the death of Tiffany, initially deemed natural. Digging deeper, he discovers the horrors of Jitters.
Upon first glances you could be mistaken for thinking that Jitters is another clown-based slasher movie, but you would be incorrect in that assumption. That is because, despite the lurid Blu-ray cover art featuring the titular clown in a suitably threatening pose, Jitters is a police procedural where intrepid detective Nick Collymore (Fabrizio Santino) is investigating the death of a young woman named Tiffany (Jessica Impiazzi), who has died alone in her flat whilst wearing a gaming headset and with no other obvious signs of injury or foul play.
As Collymore delves deeper into the world of online gaming he discovers that Tiffany was testing out a new AI gaming platform. He also discovers that one of her colleagues in Timebomb, the tech firm she worked for, was also involved in playing these online games, and was doing so shortly before he shot himself in the head with a nail-gun on camera. As Collymore, who has a teenage daughter who enjoys playing online games, uncovers what Timebomb was working on the name ‘Jitters’ keeps cropping up, but Jitters is not only the name of the game but also the central character – a psychotic clown who likes nothing more than to drive gamers mad, but he’s only AI and not real, right?
More of a tech-driven psychological thriller than a pure horror movie, Jitters has more in common with The Lawnmower Man than it does with Terrifier, although it obviously draws some inspiration from Saw and Ringu due to its mysterious setup, where we learn about what is going on as Detective Collymore does so there is (supposedly) an element of surprise as the plot unravels.
And unravels is a good word because, despite its lofty ambitions to do something a little different with the killer clown trope, Jitters cannot hold itself together for its 94-minute runtime, mainly down to the titular villain himself. The idea of a killer clown existing inside a virtual world is quite a novel one, but there is no reason as to why or how or what-does-he-want? to any of it, making his appearances feel disjointed and incongruous. Played by Daniel Jordan, there is nothing wrong with the performance but the character feels like he belongs in another movie as the writing here gives us nothing except drab exposition from the clown, with only Jordan’s pantomime theatrics giving the character any sort of personality.
Which is more than can be said for the other cast members. Detective Collymore is a fairly broad character type – he has a failed marriage, teenage daughter he only sees occasionally, doesn’t like technology all that much, has a persistent cough that may or may not come into play at some point, etc. – so you can fill in the gaps that the writing doesn’t, but for some reason Fabrizio Santino – who is British – plays him with an American accent. Fine if the movie was set in the US but it is set in London with a British cast using their natural accents, so why this random ‘American’ is working as a detective in the Met is never addressed. The performance itself is a little all over the place, the actor emoting too much when it isn’t necessary and underplaying it when it is, and that goes across the board really as we have Anto Sharp as Collymore’s colleague and best friend Harding, who is probably more likeable than Collymore but not by much, and his ex-wife Julia (Lauren Budd) shows up in a thankless and underwhelming role.
Jitters is a movie that has a lot of ideas bubbling away under the surface – some of them good, some of them very thinly stretched – but everything feels way too undercooked to gel together neatly. With another few passes through the writer’s room, a recast and a bigger budget to work with, the central idea is something that could have been expanded upon to create a creepy story with some depth, but having a villain with no clear motivation, am-dram level acting and a script that has ambitions to say something about AI and current online activities (which always dates a movie horribly) but fills it instead with trite and unconvincing dialogue means that Hellraiser: Hellworld is still the one to beat when it comes to video game-based horror icons trying to be relevant to modern audiences – surely a bar that low isn’t difficult to hurdle over?
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Chris Ward
