I think we all can agree that clowns scare the ever loving shit out of anyone. The fear even has it’s own name, Coulrophobia. Really though, do you know anyone that says, “boy, I love me some clowns.” No? I thought so. My fear of clowns isn’t so extreme that I would avoid watching a movie about them. Yeah, I might cross over to the other side of the street if I see one walking towards me, especially if it looks like Pennywise from Stephen King’s IT, a clown I assume caused the fear to be developed in a lot of people. The movie Clown tries to grab a hold of that fear and shake you to your core, but unfortunately doesn’t completely succeed. Yes, there is some scary clown action happening, but there is also long stretches of not much clown and once the clown basically turns into your average looking demon, the fear disappears. That isn’t to say this movie won’t give you some chills when watching it alone at night, it just won’t turn your hair white. With that said, grab your balloons and float on through this review with me by reading on…
PLOT SUMMARY
A loving father finds a clown suit for his son’s birthday party, only to realize the suit is part of an evil curse that turns its wearer into a killer.
MOVIE
Just in case you’ve been in the dark all this time, Clown is actually based on a faux trailer made by C.D. Ford and Jon Watts, who actually slapped Eli Roth’s name on it, just for the fun of it. It’s a pretty sweet and well made trailer and I’ll put it down at the bottom of this review so you can check it out. Eli Roth saw the trailer and liked it so much, he thought, hell, why not give these guys a chance with a feature length version, thus Clown the feature length movie was born. Now that we got that out of the way, what did I think of the movie?
Clown starts off pretty damn promising and even throws in some humour to lighten the mood a little bit. It’s the beginning of the movie that I enjoyed the most, as our main character in the movie, Kent (Andy Powers) dons the clown outfit for his son and before he can say “We all float down here,” he can’t get the damn thing off. Having to go to work in the outfit, with colourful hair and fake nose, Kent starts to panic when it looks like the crazy hair is becoming his own and the nose is fused to his face. He enlists the help of the ever crazy Peter Stormare, who plays Karlsson, the man who knows what to do to solve the problem. Hint, it involves a cleaver and decapitation.
Kent runs away from his family and tries to figure out exactly what he wants to do. After one hilarious suicide attempt, the hunger for children becomes too much and the violence starts hitting the fan. Don’t worry PC crowd, no kids are shown actually being eaten on screen… sadly. As Kent starts changing, we get away from the scary clown from the beginning and we get some weird demon (played by Eli Roth), who really doesn’t show up until the very end of the movie. In the meantime, we spend some time with Kent’s wife Meg, played by the smoking hot Laura Allen. She tries to figure out how to help her husband and keep her child safe, but sadly that involves a lot of running around and not doing much. Honestly, when I’m watching a movie called Clown, I just want to see a damn clown munching down a children left, right and centre. Plus, don’t get me started on that wasted opportunity at Chuck E. Cheese. Having a child eating clown loose in there should have been a gory feeding frenzy, but instead turned out to be just a quick happy meal. Although, I will admit the scene with the kid wandering in the tubes, whilst no music is playing, was pretty damn effective at being tense and scary.
VERDICT
Clown in the end turned out to be fun, but wasn’t the fright-fest I was hoping it would be. Yeah, the beginning was cool and at times creepy, but once the clown turns into your standard run of the mill demon, you aren’t really scared much any more. (Well, I wasn’t at least. The same might not be said for you.) Also, that Chuck E. Cheese scene turned out to be a wasted opportunity, minus one part. However, even with all that, the movie is still pretty fun and any film where the protagonist needs to feed on children is A-OK in my gross, bloody book.
RATING
-The faux trailer-