Maybe it’s because I’ve never had a traumatic childhood experience with one, but I’ve never had any sort of fear of clowns. Ever. I know they’re typically a go-to of creepiness for a lot of people, and clowns being a source of entertainment at kids’ parties is a thing of the past, but I never really understood it. Obviously there are examples like John Wayne Gacy, where the public identity of a clown masked an incredibly dark human, but going into ClownTown, I knew I’d need more than just, “See it’s creepy because the bad guys are CLOWNS!” but, sadly, that’s all I got.

Man, these clowns sure do look like some really twisted characters! Pretttttty scary!

A young boy murders his babysitter with a knife while dressed as a clown in a house that says “Strode” on the mailbox before the film cuts to a title card that reads “15 Years Later.” OH WOW, I WONDER WHERE THAT IDEA CAME FROM. Anyways, a bunch of coeds in the present are on their way to a concert when they get lost in an abandoned town, having realized one of the women lost her phone. While these doofuses wander around this dumb town, they start getting stalked by idiots in clown makeup. Why? Who cares. I guess it’s just okay that an abandoned town has psychotic clowns wandering around it. And then…well, it really doesn’t matter. I’m sure whatever you imagine in your head happens will be more exciting than what happens in this movie.

If you were nervous that a movie called “ClownTown” wouldn’t feature a character with giant boobs who distractingly wears a low cut tank top from the first moment she’s on screen, then fear not! You can breathe a sigh of relief about ClownTown.

Ugh. If you wondered what would happen if you plugged a bunch of generic horror movie concepts into a machine and let robots make a movie from the results you got, it would be ClownTown. As previously mentioned, it steals ideas from Halloween in the first five minutes (including an arbitrarily topless babysitter), the lost coeds/dysfunctional family villain dynamic from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and a “twist” about who the true murderer(s) are that feel ripped off from Friday the 13th. “But guys, what if we steal elements from other successful films but then also add clowns to the mix? IT’LL BE GENIUS!” I kept holding out hope that there’d be an interesting reveal of the origins of these clowns or justification of who let a ClownTown exist, but there was nothing. I did get to hear a resident of ClownTown deliver lines like, “Clowns are like a pack of dogs,” and, “Some people think that clowns don’t exist.” What the fuck? Does this movie take place in an alternate reality where clowns are mythical beings? AND THE SPECIAL EFFECTS WERE TERRIBLE. There are multiple sequences of violence where it looks like the attacker was told, “Okay, now use this prop as gingerly as possible, because if it looks like anyone could ever actually be hurt by this, it won’t be good for ClownTown.” The only thing even close to being good, or rather anything that wasn’t atrocious, in this movie would be that the score has moments that took influences from calliope music to fit the clown theme. That’s….that’s really it. Even that one not completely miserable part of the movie was tough to come up with, but maybe fans of clown slashers will find more appealing things in this movie than I did.

Wolfman Moon Scale

Official Site

IMDb