• Written and directed by Steve Sessions
• Starring
  • Debbie Rochon
  • Lucien Eisenbach
  • Jeff Dylan Graham
  • Brinke Stevens
  • Eric Spudic

If there’s one thing Dead Clowns has going for it, it’s atmosphere. Lots of atmosphere. So much frickin’ atmosphere that it crowds out plot, characterization, narrative tension, and all those other things I like to see in a movie. It does leave room for zombie clowns, though. So, atmosphere and zombie clowns.

The setting for our tale is Port Emmett, a small gulf coast town battening down the hatches for a hurricane. (Were I given to egregiously lame puns, I would try to tie my statements about this movie’s “atmosphere” with this plot-engine weather system, which is of course an “atmospheric” disturbance. Consider yourself lucky that I’m above that kind of thing.) In a series of time-stamped scenes (1:15pm, 1:47pm, 2:51pm, etc.) we meet a large part of our cast, most of whom remain nameless for the duration of the movie:

- A young man in a wheelchair, played by Eric Spudic, one of the hardest-working men in low-budget movies. Very late in the game his name is given as “Timmy,” but that revelation comes so near the end that it’s just easier to call him Spudic and be done. Spudic’s windows are being shuttered and plywooded by, um, someone; I at first assumed him to be a brother and co-tenant of the same household, but since he then disappears for most of the movie, I will instead consider him a neighbor.

“So, see any zombies yet?”

- Debbie Rochon as a woman alone in a big house with nothing to do but watch reports on the Weather Channel as the storm moves in. Not only is Rochon’s character never named (she’s listed in the credits as “Tormented Woman,”), but because she never interacts with another living soul, she never utters a single line of dialog.

- Brinke Stevens and her husband, driving into town in the rain and getting a motel room. He, at least, is identified in dialog as Darren (Will Riordan); she’s never identified in the movie, though the credits list her as “Lillian.” That’s the kind of revelation that keeps you sticking around through the credits, isn’t it?

- Jeff Dylan Graham as a young, bored (and, naturally, nameless) security guard at a multiplex. He at least has a minute of dialog at the beginning, as he explains to someone on his cellphone that he’s got to work that night and he plans to get wasted when he’s there all alone. After that minute, he spends the rest of his time pretty much silent.

“Sorry, but those big shoes were killing me!”

I will admit to some grudging admiration in the opening minutes, as each of these characters is introduced with as little dialog as possible. Most microbudget moviemakers feel that they need to dump setting and character via expository dialog during the first two minutes to interest the audience; here, each of the characters is shown simply going about his or her life, making what preparations he or she can for the impending storm. Now, when that dearth of detail continues throughout the movie for most characters, it gets a little old.

In fact, there are only two sustained scenes of dialog in the whole movie, and both are vehicles for a huge lump of exposition (in fact, the exposition thus offered overlaps about 80% between the two scenes). The first one comes as Brinke and Darren settle into their motel room, and Brinke explains the great hidden tragedy that colors the history of Port Emmett: in 1954, during a storm not unlike the one they’re expecting, a circus train had an accident crossing the bridge over the bay, and the clown car and calliope were lost in the water, never to be found again, thus bringing up local lore about ghostly calliopes heard on stormy nights. Oh, and Brinke also reveals that the tugboat captain who accidentally caused the accident by running into and damaging a bridge support was her father.

And by the way, I should note here that writer/director Steve Sessions recruited a heady assortment of microbudget name actors for this feature, and I mention that now because Brinke Stevens, an actress usually far above the script she’s given, is forced to recite some of the most expository exposition that’s ever been exposited. In fact, the dialog all through the movie is overly bookish, as if it had never been read aloud before being forced out between the actors’ lips; it makes the generally dialog-less tone of the movie more of a positive when we know what the alternative is.

“What’s that smell — like rotten popcorn?”

Anyway. The storm thickens (the movie being liberally seeded with real hurricane footage), power and phones start going out, and deep beneath the waters of the river something stirs under the silt… something brightly colored, with huge shoes…

Now, you may think that you can generally guess where this movie is going from the information I’ve given you. These disparate people will eventually have reason to get together as they flee the zombie clowns that have crawled from the riverbed for revenge on Port Emmett. Furthermore, you might guess that Brinke, daughter of the man who could be blamed for the accident, will have to atone for the sins of her father, and that maybe there will be themes of culpability and such woven into the background (or else so obviously appropriate that the audience will read them in).

And all I can say is, Man, I wish you had written the script. Because none of that happens. After so much time watching the characters introduced so far — the first stirring of the clowns comes at 22 minutes, the first sign to a living character that something weird might be going on comes at 25 minutes (Graham snorts coke and has a momentary vision of a murderous clown), and the first zombie clown attack is against a character we’ve never seen before. Her reaction to a home invasion by zombie clowns is, we’ll see, common to all their victims: stunned silence and semi-paralysis, allowing these slow, shuffling undead entertainers to mosey up slowly and slaughter them. That’s cool… once. But absolutely nobody in this movie screams or makes a mad dash to get away. It makes the reactions to the undead Templars in the Blind Dead movies seem hypercaffeinated by comparison.

“‘Here,’ they said. ‘Almost as good as a gun,’ they said.”

And when the clowns finally start interacting with the characters we’ve so laboriously observed to this point (the time-stamping, by the way, has been discarded or forgotten by this point), Brinke is their first victim. She doesn’t even know she’s being attacked; her glasses are off, she sees a blurry figure, and gets a hammer to the skull. So much for setup.

At least the clowns don’t attack with squirting flowers or guns with flags that say “Bang!” No, they either use bare hands, or an assortment of innocuous tools — hammers, machetes, etc. Do not ask where a dead clown on the bottom of the river gets his hands on a shining machete; if you ask that, you might ask why their flesh is rotten clear to the bone (realized by full-head masks and puppeteering) but their clown costumes are clean and neat. (The behind-the-scenes explanation is pretty obvious: while slimy, decayed clown suits that trail seaweed and leave murky puddles behind are a lot scarier than bright polyester, this production simply didn’t have the budget to ruin the clown suits they rented.) You’ll be so distracted by the bright colors and Ronald McDonald shoes, you might not even stop to wonder why the clowns were all suited up in the train car bringing them into town. I have to admit that a bunch of undead off-duty clowns, dressed in their street clothes, would lack a certain something.

So if all I’ve said is true (and you doubt me at your own peril), then who’s the protagonist? There isn’t one, really. It’s nobody’s story. We simply see the chronological narratives of several different people who are confronted by zombies clowns… really, really slowly. (Be prepared for more shots of clowns peering through darkened windows or wideshoes slowly creeping down hallways than you ever thought possible.) In fact, the characters who most resemble protagonists (in the same way that you could talk about the tea cup in your cupboard which most resembles an African elephant) are two new characters, introduced after the long and laborious introduction, a pseudo-Goth couple (Lucien Eisenach and Jenn Ruliffson) who come into town on the lam after having blown a priest’s brains out for kicks. And they qualify as protagonists if you squint your eyes just right not because they’re in any way sympathetic characters with whom the audience can identify, but simply because they’re a little more active than everyone else who simply stares in mute horror as the zombie clowns amble up to them and kill them.

“Mmm!  Better than circus peanuts!”

Being, as I am, a storycentric kind of guy, you can see how this plotless non-narrative might rub me the wrong way. And I do have to give props where due. The zombie effects are not too shabby. The cinematography, while a little murky due to the night shooting, is fairly accomplished, and the editing is good (if so, so unhurried). The actors give commendable performances (all except for the person who gives us our second steaming lump of exposition — and as she doesn’t have a track record like so many of the other performers here, I won’t embarrass her by name). And the dark ambient score which Sessions composed himself is neither intrusive nor boring, at least not in comparison to the glacial pace of the footage it accompanies.

In fact, all the elements were in place to make a quality low-budget zombie movie, except for a story. Which is sort of like a Frankenstein monster being complete except for the lightning bolt to animate it.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 10
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0 (plenty of wind and rain, but no thunder)
• Savini machete tricks: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0