Seven teenaged hobby mystery solvers come to an amusement park to take
part in what they think is little more than a paper chase - but when one
of them is killed for overstepping the rules, they only start to realize
how dead-serious the whole thing is. The youngsters try to kill their
host, a clown, to bring the game to an end, and even succeed in doing so -
but only succeed in having him replaced by another clown. This clown now
successfully pits our heroes against one another, but in the game's
finale, the teens, now down to three, manage to collaborate to kill the
head clown. They might have won the game, but still, there is no way out
of the amusement park, which is, as they only now realize, entirely run by
creepy clowns. In a cave where they hide from the clowns, the youngsters find the
former owner of the amusement park who tells them they have actually been
sucked into a parallel dimension via their gaming consoles, and they can
only return to their home through some kind of wormhole. The amusement
park owner is soon captured by the clowns and turned into one of them,
while only one of the kids makes it home through the wormhole, which
closes behind her - but she returns to the amusement park to save her
friends who have since been handed a chip to return and close the wormhole
to the amusement park dimension for good. Made on an
apparently low budget and mainly to tie in with the release of a new
instalment of the Twilight Syndrome computergame-series, Dead-go-Round
is actually a pretty amusing little flick, full of inventive (if not
always terribly well executed) death scenes, crazy plottwists and a
lengthy reference to the 1960's cult series The Prisoner
(the balloon chase scene), with an amusement park serving as a colouful
backdrop and a clown as an adequate villain in all his simplicity. That
said, the film loses a bit of steam towards the end, when a desperate
attempt is made to explain everything away (and rather unimaginatively at
that) instead of leaving the whole thing just as self-sufficiently bizarre
as it was - but that doesn't really destroy the film, which might not be a
masterpiece but quirky genre entertainment.
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