User blog:AustinDR/The Laugh (Effort Post)

Alright, yet another possible movie candidate. Amusement is a 2008 horror film starring three girls -- Shelby, Lisa, and Tabitha. These three girls used to be the best of friends when they went to the same elementary school, but over the years they had been drifting apart. However, one thing they have in common is that they seemed to have acquired the attention of a deranged man that they knew from their youth....

Who is he?
The nameless killer goes by the name "the Laugh." Not much is known about the killer, but what is known is that he attended Briar Hills Elementary with the three girls. He was noted as being pretty psychotic in his behavior, and was ultimately taken to a mental institution when his actions were becoming more dangerous. Years later, he left the institution, thus leading to this....

What has he done?
In the beginning of the film, Shelby and her boyfriend Rob were on their way to Cincinnati, at least until they stop at a gas station to refuel. When there, they meet a man driving a Jeep, where he informs them that the interstate was jammed. After getting their fuel, Shelby and Rob continue driving. Earlier, they had been following a semi driver along the road; Shelby notices a young woman in the back of the truck (even though the driver claimed that he was alone). The woman reappears giving them a note saying "help me," before jumping out of the truck and colliding with the windshield. This alerts the couple and the driver owning the Jeep. They consult the girl, seeing that she was still alive, and the owner of the Jeep sends Rob out to get the semi driver's license numbers. Later on, Rob finds the Jeep owner injured. Claiming that the semi driver came back, the two go to a seemingly abandoned house where it's revealed that the semi driver was just a concerned father who was going to take his drug addicted daughter to a rehabilitation center. He notices the Jeep, and he goes outside to investigate. Without warning the owner of the Jeep attacks the man from behind, bludgeoning him. While waiting for him to return, Rob looks back and sees something squirming underneath some sheets. He pulls them, back and to his horror, he sees Shelby and the girl from earlier bound and gagged. The owner of the Jeep returns with a sledgehammer in hand. As he began to choke the life out of Rob, he asks him if he thought this was funny.

Sometime later, Tabitha arrives to her Aunt Grace's house, slightly annoyed by the fact that June -- the name of the babysitter hired to babysit her two cousins Max and Danny -- left. Whilst she's looking after her cousins, Tabitha gets a knock on the door. On the other side of the door is a hooded figure claiming to be June's boyfriend, Owen. He claims that he had been trying to call June all day, but she was missing. Tabitha assures him that she'd tell him that he stopped there, and he leaves. Tabitha then finds a room filled with various clown dolls, including one that was life-sized and sitting in a rocking chair. Naturally, Tabitha becomes intimidated by the clown doll, and when her aunt calls, she discusses it with her. The catch, though is that they don't own a clown doll like that. Realizing this, Tabitha races towards the boys' room, and she locks herself in the room with them. The boys tell her that Owen was just wanting to play...and then "Owen" tries to break his way into the room with knives, clearly intending to kill all three of them (Tabitha seriously should've invested in a life supply of tangelos). The boys manage to escape through their window while Tabitha herself is confronted by the killer. She is then seen being interrogated by a therapist who asked her if she knew anything about a young boy who attended Briar Hills Elementary School with her and her childhood friends. We are then treated to a flashback where the students are assigned with creating a shoe box that can be viewed through a peephole. The young boy shows Shelby and her friends his which is....a live rat with its skin pulled back by chains, thereby revealing its organs. They tell him that it was disgusting, but he had a good laugh about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mITvlq9Bhp4).

Lastly, Lisa Swan returns home only to see her roommate, Cat, missing. Together with her boyfriend, Dan, the two head for a hotel that Cat said she would be staying at. Dan is invited into the hotel by the caretaker who offers to show him an old music player, stating that there was a surprise at the end of the song. And, of course, Dan trusts the shady guy he just met to meet him up on his offer, and he plays the music player, which results in him receiving a knife in the eye. After he was gone for hours, Lisa sneaks her way into the hotel, and she meets a deaf man. The deaf man leads her towards a room, where it is revealed that bodies were stuffed into some of the mattresses. She does find Cat still alive in a mattress, only to realize that the deaf man was the killer all along. He then stitches the fabric of the mattress over Cat's head, laughing madly as he makes Lisa watch.

Tabitha's session with the therapist ends, and she abruptly leaves after saying that one of her first assignments was that male student the girls knew years ago. Tabitha immediately realizes that this was a trap set up by the killer, and she tries to escape only to see that the therapist had also been killed, and that the police officer that came to investigate was the killer. The killer traps Tabitha in a room with two glasses on each side. The glass walls began to come closer towards each other, but they come short with crushing Tabitha to death. On each side of the glass, Tabitha sees Shelby and Lisa in a similar fashion to the rat -- restrained by chains with their abdomens split open. The killer arrives, and makes it seem like he was going to slice Shelby's exposed organs with the knife. At the last minute, he rips the organs out, revealing that it was all one sadistic prank to mess with Tabitha. He then tries to slice Shelby open for real, but Tabitha begins laughing. Interested, the killer lets his guard down, and he walks over to her....only to be met on the receiving end of a scalpel in the neck. Tabitha frees the girls, and they race towards the door. The killer is revealed to still be alive, and he stabs Lisa, killing her. The remaining girls try to escape up a ladder, but the killer grabs Shelby by the ankle, causing both of them to fall to their seeming deaths. Tabitha finds a closet and tries to hide in it, only to realize that she was at the back of the killer's truck.

The killer seemed as if he was going to get away with what he had done...if it wasn't for his truck breaking down at the last minute. Seizing this opportunity, Tabitha grabs the killer's knives, and stabs him through the eye when he looked at her through a peephole.

Freudian Excuse? Mitigating factors?
Now, the killer has been stated to have been a psychologically troubled man even when he was still a kid. However, this does not undercut his morality; the killer is aware that what he is doing is wrong, but he does so anyway, because he sees everything as some big joke. Besides that, he is pretty intelligent for a lower class psychopath; he orchestrated all of these events simply so he could capture the three girls, some of which took a great amount of meticulous planning to carry out. That's not even getting into his disguises, and how he's a talented manipulator.

As for the whole bullying thing...the girls never bullied the killer. All they did was say that his shoe box was sick (which it was), but that bruised his ego enough that he spent the rest of his life coming up with ways of getting revenge on these three girls for such a flimsy reason. Tabitha does claim that she and the other girls bullied him when they knew he was mentally unstable, but we only have her word to take for it. They are never shown bullying the killer in any of the flashbacks. They only saw him as sick and twisted, but they never physically or mentally bullied him. Besides that, the film doesn't attempt to make the killer sympathetic in any shape or form.

Heinous standard
As the sole antagonist, he sets it.

Conclusion
I don't know. I would personally lean towards keep, but I can see if you have any certain convictions with him counting. It was actually a pretty good movie in all honesty.