Director – Gregory Plotkin, Teleplay – Simon Boyes, Based on a Treatment by Nikolai Von Keller, Producers – Eben Davidson, Adam Goodman & Andrew Sugerman, Photography – John Frost, Visual Effects – Bill Kunin, Special Effects Supervisors – Archie Jack & Jefferson Wagner, Production Design – Madeline O’Brien & Naomi Prentice. Production Company – Invisible Narratives/Faze Clan.
Cast
Brian “Faze Rug” Awadis (Rug), Anthony Jabro (Anthony), Noah Rojas (Noah), Vanessa Lyon (Marie), Sana “Mama Rug” Awadis (Mama Rug), Ron “Papa Rug” Awadis (Papa Rug), Lina Green (Officer Rawls), Jessica Awadis (Jessica), Chaley Rossman (Ernie), Debbie Deltoro (Dog Walker), Nicky Romaniello (Officer Travers)
Plot
Brian Awadis, who runs a highly successful YouTube channel as Faze Rug, buys a five million dollar mansion and moves into it on his own. He has barely moved in and starts experiencing strange things – red balloons floating through the air, circus music playing at night. He and his friends discover that the house next door is inhabited by clowns. However, the very act of going to investigate seems to trigger the clowns who play a series of malicious games and pranks, entering the house and terrifying Rug and his friends.
I am not a follower of YouTube celebrity culture and social media influencers. As a result, I must admit I had no idea who Brian Awadis, aka FazeRug, and the FazeClan were prior to watching Crimson. Awadis, the child of Iraqi immigrants to the US, began posting gaming clips in 2008 and then became part of FazeClan, specialising in gaming, pranks and the whole influencer thing. At current writing, the Faze Clan channel boasts 8.5 million subscribers (Wikipedia claims 25 million) and advertises itself as the most subscribed gaming channel on YouTube. Crimson is a feature-film spun out from the FazeClan’s popularity and features Awadis, his family and regular collaborators in a fictional plot that has been based around them.
Realising that you are watching a feature-film spinoff of a YouTube gag channel makes one’s enthusiasm plummet to zero as you start to watch Crimson. Expectedly, a good percentage of the film is based around Awadis and his associates and family pranking one another, including at one point letting off rockets around the neighbourhood. A reasonable percentage of these scenes give the impression that they are being improvised by Awadis and associates.
Crimson also proves to be a killer clown film. This is a genre that gained a life of its own after the release of the remake of It (2017), which has seen a whole host of low-budget copies of killer clown films including the likes of Clowntergeist (2017), 8 Ball Clown (2018), Big Top Evil (2019), Clown (2019), Clown Motel (2019) and Clownado (2019), among others. (For a more detailed listing see Killer Clown Films).
Brian “Faze Rug” Awadis and killer clown
Certainty, in making a horror film, Awadis has gone to those who know what they are doing. In this case, he has employed Gregory Plotkin, an editor who performed duties on all of the Paranormal Activity sequels and made his directorial debut on the final sequel Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015) Plotkin next went on to direct the Halloween haunt horror film Hell Fest (2018) and has also produced several other horror films including Area 51 (2015), Nightlight (2015) and Countdown (2019). Moreover, screenwriter Simon Boyes is a regular collaborator with director Adam Mason on films such as Broken (2006), The Devil’s Chair (2006) and Blood River (2009), among others.
When Gregory Plotkin is allowed to do his thing, Crimson starts to work as a film. There is the particularly spooky image of red balloons floating through the street, the backyard and later more ominously inside the house. The last twenty or so minutes have some undeniably eerie effects with clowns appearing outside and then inside the house, including one on stilts moving around the yard. Here Gregory Plotkin creates a number of adept jumpshocks, followed by an unnerving sequence where Awadis and friends have to venture inside the clown house, filled with a DayGlo maze and an alley of clowns popping up in every direction.
