If women ever wanted to see a film of why men are terrible and feel terrible afterwards then Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men would probably be your best bet. If women ever wanted to see a film about why men are terrible and laugh uncontrollably at our inadequacies, perversions, insensitivities, hormonal indulgences, and even occasional homosexual confusions (am I right men? Huh?….right?…) then Clown is it. It objectifies just about every single reason why a woman would doubt going into a relationship with a man and yet does it with some of the most pointed, extreme, and filthy sense of humor imaginable.

As a westerner I always wondered whether the depiction of “pikeys” in Guy Ritchie’s film Snatch had any semblance of truth in them, or were they exaggerated caricatures. Thanks to Ian Palmer’s documentary Knuckle I got my answer to elements I didn’t even think to question. Oh, and by the way the answer is no – Brad Pitt and his fellow fast-talk-mumbling-slang spitters in love with caravans and bare-knuckle fighting are not caricatures. Not completely, anyway.

Well here we are again. Die-hard movie geeks can put their socks and shoes back on and cease the anticipatory countdown because Fantastic Fest is back! This year, as last, I am proud to be a part of the Fantastic Fest Death Squad here at FSR and if you were lucky enough to follow our festival write-ups last year, you are aware of just how serious we take this stuff and you can count on more of the same gluttonously comprehensive coverage this year. As I was the only Reject on last year’s team who had any previous Fantastic Fest experience, I was tasked with putting our rookies through a brutal, two week boot camp to ensure they would survive their first year. I got them up at the crack of noon each day, injected them with Scotch, and made them memorize the playbook while rupturing their eardrums by blasting show tunes. But despite my best efforts, they survived and enter year two as seasoned veterans. So I decided to put together a second set of commandments aimed at not only our Death Squad in their second year, but any sophomore Fantastic Fest attendees.