Review of Clown (2014) by Mark M — 02 Mar 2015

Obviously taking cues from creature features based on transformation and the slow loss of one's human self to some form of newfound enveloping terror, Clown harkens back to the days of The Fly (1986) and Wolf (1994), though it's all style over substance. Without mincing words, Clown is a B-movie with a rather large budget - for an indie horror movie - given the production value based on everything from the cinematography to the great creature effects. But as the Transformers franchise has shown, as large of a budget an intrinsically mediocre movie has, it would still remain as such.

Bar the increasingly terrifying second and gruesome third acts, Clown begins by thrusting realtor Kent into the thick of things the very moment the movie begins, leaving little to develop him as a character to root for. It takes less than seven minutes - into the movie - for Kent to put on the clown costume and for the first instances of the ensuing series of weird events to begin. In retrospect, it took Seth Brundle around fourty minutes to use the "Telepods" in The Fly, at which point - along with Jeff Goldblum's performance - the character had already charmed the pants off the viewer. Though Andy Powers' performance is decent enough, his character is as one-dimensional as horror leads tend to go, and by extension, the same goes for the performance of his co-stars and the depth of their characters.

Clown then quickly devolves into an experience where its payoff resides plainly on how far director Jon Watts and screenwriter Christopher Ford were willing to go with the violence and gore, which in itself, proved to be pure exploitation and shock value that intertwines with the fictional mythos around the clown suit, demonology and - taking cues from It (1990) - the consumption of children, though it does keep its end of the bargain by concurrently exploring the idea of losing control of oneself - both physically and psychologically - as shown with Kent's transformation. Just don't think too hard about the insipid characters and their harebrained actions - particularly by Kent's wife, Meg (Laura Allen) -, and Clown will prove itself to be worth a watch even if it's a slightly above average horror movie based around an evil clown.