Movie Review: Clowntown (2016)
Clowntown is not a good film. Not a good horror film, not a good clown film, not a good anything pretty much. It’s not even the low budget that was bad. It was everything but the low budget that was. The writing didn’t make sense, the lines seemed like they were read from a teleprompter at times, and it was hard to watch. Aside from the changing scene that happens in the first few minutes, there is no other reason to watch this.
It starts out with a babysitter who is watching a boy, who tells her the previous babysitter had an accident. The family’s name is “Strode”, which seems like a nod to the Strode family from Halloween. The babysitter tells the kid to go to bed, he comes back out wearing a clown outfit and is told to go to bed again. Babysitter’s fate is pretty obvious here. The rest of the film is pretty much terrible. The clowns that have the entire town spooked are armed with a crowbar, a bat, and other melee weapons. There are also only a few of them. The people they are antagonizing in this film seem completely terrified of the fact that there is someone with a crowbar trying to attack them. A crowbar.
These clowns aren’t even really dressed like clowns. They have face paint on, but one guy looks like Sting or the Crow or something. It seems like the artistic direction needed some work here. The film is called “Clowntown”. If you are going to make a horror film about clowns, make them scary. If you see a clown holding a crowbar, you are not going to be as afraid as you would be if they were holding something like a machete. Granted one does have an axe but not much is done with it. Just in case you were wondering what evil clowns do when they aren’t terrorizing the town, they work at a diner as busboys and whatnot. Maybe that’s why they couldn’t afford firearms. Thanks, Obama! (I know that was a small spoiler, but we are really hoping nobody watches this after reading this review.)
At some point, the people on the run hook up with a guy who looks like he could be Kenny Rogers’ twin brother, and he is living in some kind of warehouse building. Unlike Kenny Rogers, he didn’t know when to walk away… from this role! I don’t know how much he got paid, but hopefully, it was enough to drink the memory of this movie away!
We think most of the film had us wondering why five people would be running from a guy holding a baseball bat. There is a version you can watch that includes commentary in the special features, but we think we would rather actually fight five “clowns” holding crowbars or baseball bats with our bare hands before we would consider watching this ever again.
