Devil’s Junction: Handy Dandy’s Revenge (2019) Review
Returning to the abandoned Detroit television station where they once delighted a generation of children viewers, master puppeteer Mister Jolly (Bill Oberst Jr.) re-incarnates his minion puppets for a final performance to settle an old score with Richard (Bill Moseley). The rare blood moon casts an ominous glow as Mr Jolly unleashes his puppets, lead by the infamous Handy Dandy to seek his revenge. Further complicating Richard’s dilemma is the unexpected arrival to the Studio of his son Steffen (Jake Red) and his friends. The group become entangled in the thrilling pursuit by Mr Jolly and Handy Dandy through the annuls of the old studio building. They soon realize that they are in a new version of “Mister Jolly and the Handy Dandy Show” -where pain is the game!
Originally entitled HANDY DANDY, but now burdened with the rather hefty moniker of DEVIL’S JUNCTION : HANDY DANDY’S REVENGE, this is a messy affair of a movie. I really didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. Everything started off fine, if still a little unnecessarily muddled, and I followed the plot’s general gist but then the script and direction muddied the waters and I gave up on wanting to watch. There’s very little sense lurking within director Jeff (Night of the Living Dead 3D) Broadstreet’s latest movie squandering the talents of Genre vets Bill Moseley (Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects, 3 From Hell) and Bill Oberst, Jr. (3 From Hell, Death House).
I stuck with the viewing as, initially, it played like one of those flicks that are actually so bad they’re still fun to watch but it soon became so bad that it’s just BAD! I feel awful saying this but DEVIL’S JUNCTION is truly awful. It’s almost worth watching for the most inappropriate movie scoring in an age, the musical accompaniment is constant but never really suits what’s happening onscreen, it’s almost as if the score was lifted from another movie and dumped onto this without a thought as to whether it actually matched. The score overeggs things at the oddest moments such as a simple onscreen chat could end up with really dramatic music at odds tonally with the context of the dialogue.
Throughout the film there are little moments that really jarred in a WTF kind of way. DEVIL’S JUNCTION is one of those films where someone can be meet a violent death and the other characters simply behave like nothing of any consequence has just happened, as if it’s not out of the ordinary for them to witness a friend lose the lower half of their body. Elsewhere there a couple of overweight masked men lumbering around for no apparent reason which, like the film’s score, feels like it’s been cut in from another movie. In fact that’s the big problem with DEVIL’S JUNCTION, it doesn’t play like one coherent movie, instead it plays like bits from three or four flicks have been pieced together with little rhyme or reason.
TRAILER
