Viking Night: Killer Klowns From Outer Space
By Bruce Hall
July 2, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The Klowns in question are interstellar circus freaks who find the sweet, savory taste of human flesh all but impossible to resist. And their story starts the same way most horror movies do - in a small town, with a bunch of 30-year-old actors pretending to be teenagers. One night everyone is up at Makeout Point when a meteorite lands nearby, drawing the attention of absolutely no one but frisky Joe Tobacco (Grant Cramer) and his girlfriend Debbie (Suzanne Snyder). Like most kids, they pass up the opportunity to get drunk and screw to go see what they expect to be a flaming hole in the ground.
What they find is a strange circus tent out in the middle of nowhere. Like Dr. Who's crib, the place is much larger inside than out, and the decor is best described as Death Star meets Pee Wee's Playhouse. They stumble upon a colorful chamber filled with cotton candy cocoons, roughly sufficient in size to accommodate say, a human adult. So shockingly, they find inside them the bloody remains of several townspeople, including a good friend of Joe's. Soon they're interrupted by a pair of grotesque looking aliens, dressed like Klowns, armed with popcorn scatter guns and chattering like demented squirrels. The kids escape, but their intrusion prompts the aliens to unleash a wave of delicious candy coated murder on the unsuspecting town.
Joe takes Debbie to the police station, where her dashing ex-boyfriend Dave (John Allen Nelson) is on duty with his partner Mooney (John Vernon, importing his performance from Animal House), an acerbic old timer who hates teenagers almost as much as he loves whiskey. Mooney mocks their story, as is his way, but Dave is more sympathetic. So after dropping Debbie off at home (consensus: girls should not be exposed to danger) the boys hit the woods, only to find...nothing. Enraged, Dave arrests Joe and they head back to town, only to find a small posse of insane Klowns tearing the place apart and harvesting people like summer wheat. With egg on his face and the city in chaos, Dave has no choice but to join forces with Joe and Debbie to repel the Klown invasion single handedly - with or without mean old officer Mooney and his friend Jack Daniels.
For a while, it’s even worse than it sounds. On the upside, the visual effects and makeup design are better than they have any right to be, and are clearly where all the money went. On the other hand there’s some truly bad acting here, particularly in the first half hour - and it’s on a scale most people will not be immediately prepared to deal with. Most of the dialogue sets off my WTF meter at “waking up to find Seth Rogen painting your living room" level. The sets are slightly above community college quality, and I’d guess the total wardrobe budget to be just North of $150. Most people will be a little turned off by this, and if you already have a paralyzing childhood fear of clowns, you might end up in the bathroom crying and puking your guts out. But if you're sick like me, you'll be delighted by the concept of mutant space Klowns using futuristic circus technology to turn humans into milkshakes.
In fact, this movie eventually perverts everything about clowns into something sinister. Water guns, cotton candy, balloon animals, ice cream, big shoes, confetti...they've all been turned into grotesque instruments of death. Getting hit with a pie will melt your face, puppet shows end with murder, and the popcorn eats YOU. And believe it or not it took three people - brothers Charles, Stephen and Edward Chiodo - to write and direct this insanity. I guess they had childhood issues to deal with, but they deserve a lot of credit for trying, because the final product is actually kind of funny. What Killer Klowns lacks in overall quality it more than makes up for by doubling down on a very simple concept, and sticking to it at any cost. This is a dumb movie about Killer Klowns From Outer Space, whose characters seem to know they're in a dumb movie about Killer Klowns From Outer Space.
But far and away the best thing in the movie is the Klowns themselves. They look like something from the set of Ghostbusters had sex with something from the set of Labyrinth and then ran away to join the circus. They're a little funny, a little terrifying and a lot straight out of a toddler's nightmares. They never really speak but their ghoulish grins and gleefully murderous antics really drive the last half of the film. At first this movie is almost offensively bad but over time, if you allow it, you'll get sucked into the joke. Like all clowns, whether they’re being dragged away from a birthday party by the police, or sleeping it off in an alley behind a dumpster, you kind of have to laugh. If you’re still watching by the time the Klowns stage a late night circus parade down Main Street, shambling and grinning as they joyfully encase innocent people in pink death-candy, you will be all in.
So don't mind the cheap sets, the bad acting or the horrific dialogue. Like an unambitious teenager, Killer Klowns knows just what it is, and it has zero aspiration to be anything more. This is not a good film; in fact it's an almost nightmarishly bad one. But it's a hysterically insane idea executed with lots of spirit, right down to the annoyingly catchy theme song. And it's hard to hold too much against a movie that takes a moment, right before the climax of the story, to acknowledge just how stupid it knows it is. If I were still in seventh grade, I'd be doodling Killer Klowns on my desk right now. And if I wasn't already horrified by clowns, I sure as hell would be now.