I am now freed from any concern of eternal torment, for nothing could be as horrifying as what man hath wrought.
SUMMARY
It was a great wailing and a gnashing of teeth. There was a lake of fire, which was also of blood. The screams of anguish permeated through every atom of my being, only for me to realize that the cacophony was escaping from my own throat. Or, others might describe it thus:
A woman named Savannah (Rachel Lagen) tries to leave her husband, a clown named Big Ronnie (John O’Hara) for another man. Turns out Ronnie is the jealous type, so he kills the new man and starts torturing Savannah. Savannah turns to her friend Autumn (Jeanne Silver), a voodoo priestess, to curse Big Ronnie. Rather than just killing them, however, Autumn’s spell gets turned back on her and Big Ronnie and his clown posse of questionable mental health get superpowers. They can fly through a tornado and gain strange monstrous attributes. Soon they start to wreak havoc upon all the unsuspecting victims they can find, including the audience.
END SUMMARY
Those who read this blog regularly are probably aware that I have four irrational fears: Clowns, spiders, spider-clowns, and clown-spiders. The book IT was really rough on me, is what I’m saying. Also, the game Dark Cloud 2, weirdly. So, naturally, when a horror movie came out that is focused entirely upon clowns, I decided that I would face my fears and see it. A friend of mine, we’ll call him “AndTheRippers,” recommended that I drink myself just shy of blacking out to watch it, and I took that advice to heart. It probably saved my life, but I don’t know that death wouldn’t be a respite from living in a world where this film roams freely, able to claim innocent victims. So, I am here to warn everyone.
Clownado is what happens when the Asylum, makers of Transmorphers and Avengers Grimm has too much dignity for an idea. It’s what happens when Troma Entertainment, maker of Killer Condom, goes “that’s in poor taste.” Gigli is art compared to this, and that movie caused a number of Hollywood executives to spontaneously self-decapitate. Technically, this is not the worst movie I’ve seen, because Iconoclast exists and this movie at least has stuff happen in it, but I really have to debate whether “nothing” is better than “being stabbed repeatedly in the mind.”
The movie tries to apologize for all of its faults up front by saying it’s a VHS tape of a late-night movie from the 90s, which… yeah, it kind of makes sense that this would come from there. While a lot of movies do this as a style choice, here, it really does feel like a way to avoid having to know anything about making decent movies. Because of that, any editing problems, camera mistakes, bad special effects, or sound errors are inherently forgivable as “part of the low-budget charm.” Well, not to me, Clownado, not to me.
Similar to the effects and editing, the movie hopes that the strange low-budget body-count increasing characters will also be overlooked as being part of the genre. If you asked me to remember most of them, I would be talking in broad strokes. I know there were strippers, because of course there were, and rednecks, because of course there were. There were also storm-chasers because the title has “nado” in it, even though the Clownado is explicitly magical and ill-defined. To its small, small, small, credit, there is at least one character that I will never forget: Random Black Elvis (Antwoine Steele). Yes, this movie has an African-American Elvis impersonator who gives the closest thing to a believable performance in the movie and I will treasure him always as Tantalus would treasure a small drop of water on his tongue.
However, the clowns are the most ridiculous characters and not in the way they wanted. The clowns have accents, but never the same accent from scene to scene. Sometimes they talk like tough-guys from the 1920s, sometimes they talk like greasers, sometimes they talk like Bozo the clown. Sometimes they switch between them in mid-sentence. I can only assume that the crew working on this film had earplugs in to spare them from the madness that would be inherent from viewing this movie that closely, so they probably didn’t notice. Alternatively, they couldn’t afford a second take. Potentially more horrifyingly, these might have BEEN the best takes.
Now let’s talk about clown boobs. Yes, this is a thing that cannot be avoided in this movie, and if my writing starts to devolve into a string of curses for my fate, just know that I am doing this for you, dear readers. So, there is a female clown in the movie named Satchel (Cayt Feinics) and, I suppose there’s no other way to say it, her breasts eat people. They literally transform into tiny horrifying maws of death and she shoves people into them. I’m pretty sure she also grows a mouth from her stomach, but I think my mind was so broken from the former body horror that I was incapable of comprehending the things onscreen for a while. It’s not even a particularly clever lead-in to the revelation, I think she just says “Look at my perfect t*tties. They’re all natural motherf*cker” and then throws someone head first into her chest teeth. I don’t know who this scene was written for, but I suspect that the target audience are currently serving a mandatory sentence somewhere.
Look, I’m not against doing intentionally bad movies, like Sharknado, and I love unintentionally bad movies, like The Room or Troll 2, but both of those still have some amount of heart and effort behind them. This felt like someone cared long enough to go “Sharknado exists and so do Clowns, what if we tried to cash in on both of those?” and everything after that was just “add stuff to make it feature-length” and “add enough gratuitous gore to make someone out there find their future in serial murder.” The main thing is that, despite the creativity of some of the set-ups, the movie still feels unimaginative and lackluster. I realize that a lot of great works are born from the idea of “let’s throw these two things together and see if they become greater than their parts,” but this was a ton of elements thrown into a movie and none of them really are given anything more than lip service. I never cared about anything or anyone on screen aside from maybe Black Elvis. I’m a coulrophobic and the movie was less scary for the presence of killer clowns than it was for being just a giant waste of time.
Avoid this movie like the plague. Not the bubonic one, something more painful, like a plague of small scorpions coated in gonorrhea and lava that climb into all of your orifices at the same time. Honestly, that still sounds better than this movie.
If you want to check out some more by the Joker on the Sofa, check out the 100 Greatest TV Episodes of All Time, Collection of TV Episodes, Collection of Movie Reviews, or the Joker on the Sofa Reviews.
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