Movie Review: “ClownTown” Fails To Deliver Any Sort Of Credibility

[yasr_overall_rating]
 

A group of friends get stranded in a seemingly deserted small town and find themselves stalked by a violent gang of psychopaths dressed as clowns.

I have to applaud director Tom Nagel for taking today’s contemporary “evil clown” representation and filling his movie with not just one of them, not even two, but at least five. That’s more than enough to force people who suffer from Coulrophobia to run for the hills. And that may be exactly what happened with the film’s story. Or lack thereof. Two couples, Brad and Sarah (Brian Nagel & Lauren Compton), and Mike and Jill (Andrew Staton & Katie Keene), are on their way to a festival when they get stranded in a small Ohio town. With nobody around and dusk fast approaching, they quickly encounter a group of killer clowns, hellbent on slaughtering each and every one of them. On the run in a town they don’t know, the friends must evade capture long enough to formulate a plan in order to survive their hellish nightmare.

“ClownTown” is beautiful to look at and director Tom Nagel and cinematographer Ken Stachnik, utilizing the Red Pro 5.0, give the movie flawless visuals and masterful aerial shots, but sadly, that is about all. In a brief scene early on in the film, we discover that there was a terrible train crash a number of years back but it never goes into detail as to what the fallout encompassed. We are told that because of the accident, people left town and only a small handful still remain but at night, they stay in and lock their doors as the clowns come out. Why are they dressed as clowns? What purpose do they serve? Apparently, their only function is to scare the crap out of any stranded motorists who, wouldn’t you know it, just happen to be stuck in an area where there is absolutely no phone service whatsoever.

The story would have been better served had it explained that the train accident released deadly chemicals into the air that affected any human in the immediate vicinity and in that area, there just happened to be a circus and instead of killing the clowns within, it turned them into deranged, cannibalistic monsters. As far-fetched as that might sound, I would have believed that story instead of what we are given here. In any slasher flick, besides the blood and gore, we need to know the motive of the antagonist, as ridiculous and fantastic as it might be, but here, that aspect is pretty much left up in the air. We have people dressed up as clowns who look menacing and carry large, intimidating weapons. Why? Because it looks frightening.

Jason looks scary, Freddy looks scary, Pinhead and his Cenobites are the stuff of nightmares but even they all have motives, no matter how tiring and repetitive they have become. The clowns in “ClownTown” serve no other purpose than to traipse around after stranded motorists and then butcher them, again, for no plausible reason. The acting for the most part is fine but even that is pushing it. No amount of good acting can save a broken script, and that is exactly what we have here, another example of style over substance. Maybe next time, a decent script could serve as a good starting point over gorgeous visuals, instead of the other way around.

In select theaters September 30th & on VOD and DVD October 4th