REVIEW: Killer Klowns From Outer Space (Stephen Chiodo, 1988)

I will happily admit that Killer Klowns from Outer Space makes full use of its premise, finding every twist on popular klown tropes that it can. Balloon animals, carnival popcorn, and cotton candy take on horrific new dimensions in the story.  I loved a gag involving a hungry shadow puppet.  But the klowns themselves lack personality.  All bedecked in the same broad style, incapable of speaking, dependent on the primitive animatronics to express themselves.  The klowns never achieve the anarchic spirit found in the Gremlins pictures, and their arbitrary big bad (referred to as Klownzilla, natch) behaves exactly as the other klowns do, only more slowly.

If one relegated all the klown antics to a short subject, then we’d be talking.

Unfortunately, the film falls into the trap of trash like Freddy vs. Jason and Society, both of which spent way too much time with their boring leads, not nearly enough on their ridiculous elements.  In Killer Klowns, protagonists Mike and Debbie are not interesting, at all, yet much of the time is wasted depicting their romance, which becomes a dull triangle as the film progresses.  Meanwhile, comic relief from a couple of bumbling brothers falls flat.  Hell, even John Vernon of Animal House is stuck in limbo, fuming in every scene, just so we remember to dislike him.  There’s no one to root for, no one to root against.

One of the problems I have with films like Killer Klowns is the way that the premise is emphasized over the story.  The title promises zaniness, and, to be sure, alien clowns are a rarity in cinema.  Then the filmmakers dilute the premise by stuffing it inside a dull pre-packaged narrative.  To wit: killer alien klowns are on the loose, but will Debbie choose Dave or Mike?  I don’t care.  I will never care.  And the occasional rewards, like seeing a klown suck blood through a crazy straw, are not enough.  I don't want such measured returns.  Damn it, I want my killer klown movies to be insane.

RATING: C

P.S. The filmmakers, the Chiodo brothers, eventually produced the much better baroque carnival of Alex Winter’s Freaked.  Check it out.

NOTE: Upcoming articles will include some of the following: Slender Man, Clarice Starling, stop-motion skeletons, or Tom Noonan.