Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988)

April 6, 2005

by Nathan Shumate

Directed by Stephen Chiodo
Written and produced by Charles, Edward, and Stephen Chiodo
Starring
- Grant Cramer
- Suzanne Snyder
- John Allen Nelson
- John Vernon
- Michael Siegel

It should come as no surprise that clowns are evil. It may be a little more surprising that they’re actually from outer space, and they drink human blood. Beyond that, though, Killer Klowns From Outer Space doesn’t try to surprise. This is intentional camp, following the conventions of a million B-movies in the service of a wonderfully ludicrous premise, and the fun comes more from seeing the devious ways in which the Chiodo Brothers use carnival buffoonery as springboards for carnage than from any dramatic suspense.

“Hey, you never know when a rubber raft’s gonna come in handy!”

In fact, the plot could best be described in its obligatories. As we all know, any mysterious shooting star must fall in such a way that it attracts the attention of either (a) teens necking at the lookout point over the town, or (b) a crazy old coot. Here, we get both! The old coot (Royal dano), being closer, ventures out into the woods and finds a mysterious carnival tent at the crash site. He and his dog disappear in quick succession, at the hands of… a clown!

Meanwhile, the only two lovebirds out necking who bother to pay attention to the shooting star are college kids Mike (Grant Cramer) and Debbie (Suzanne Snyder), and decide that going off to look for it is more exciting than whatever they were about to get up to. (At Deb’s insistence, actually. Given that Mike has an inflatable raft in the back of his 4×4, I think it’s a good choice.) They venture out into the woods, and discover… a carnival tent!

Oh, don’t worry — he looks like the jovial sort.

Well, it’d be a short movie if our protagonist pair met the same end as our throwaway coot, so instead they find the door in and wander around the brightly-striped corridors. The engine room they find (complete with warp core) convinces them that they’re actually on a UFO; the storage room, in which they find the coot’s body cocooned in cotton candy, lets them know that these aliens aren’t the cuddly, New Age space brothers. After a close encounter with one of the clowns’ popcorn gun, they escape to make it back to town and warn the populace.

Which works about as well as you’d expect. Especially when, after discussing how insane their story sounds, they still spill it forth complete with spaceships, killer alien clowns, cotton-candy cocoons, and popcorn firearms. One would think that a moment’s reflection would tell them that simplifying it to “somebody dressed like a clown is killing people” would garner a lot more respect. After all, by 1988 everyone had seen at least one slasher flick featuring an unstoppable killer in a garish disguise, and a town with a name like “Crescent Cove” seems ready-made for its own local serial killer. But no, Mike and Deb insist on sounding like complete lunatics to the police.

I ask you: Which of these two would rather be at the gay bar on a Friday night?

Fortunately, the increasingly-unpleasant Officer Mooney (John Vernon) isn’t the only cop on duty; in fact, young and cleancut Officer Dave (John Allen Nelson) is Debbie’s ex-boyfriend who’s still carrying a torch for her, so there’s at least one listening ear. After insisting that they drop Debbie off at home, Dave and Mike head back up into the woods to check out their story. Of course, the carnival tent is no longer there, and Dave’s ready to haul Mike’s ass back to sit the weekend in the cooler, but on the way back down to town they pass the lookout point, now strewn with abandoned vehicles… and traces of cotton candy…

Baldly rehearsing the plot would come across as tedious, as there’s much running back and forth, trying to warn the populace and get back to Debbie before the clowns capture the entire town. (Meanwhile, Mooney sits self-righteously in the cop shop, convinced that the scores of calls he’s getting about surly pierrots are all some elaborate hoax aimed at him personally.) In the end, all the right people are dead, all the right people are alive, and the world is set to rights with the obligatory “shocker” tacked on.

Actually, compared to SOME of the clowns I’ve seen delivering pizza…

But the plot is mostly an excuse on which to hang all of the killer clown gags they could come up with. You’ve got the cotton-candy guns and the popcorn guns (and the popcorn grows into clown-faced creatures itself), ferocious hand puppets, bloodhound balloon animals, ferocious shadow puppets, flesh-eating cream pies, and the classic “how many clowns from a small car” schtick. The clowns show up on doorsteps under any number of pretexts — pizza delivery, candy-grams — in order to wrap the unsuspecting locals in cotton candy and hoover them up into a big garish parade float rolling down the street. Mooney gets grabbed by a party razzer with fingers and ends up a flesh-and-blood ventriloquist dummy. And my favorite gag? Debbie runs from a clown in her apartment, throws open the window… and there below are five clowns in fireman hats, holding one of those trampoliney things to catch her.

Technically, the whole thing’s well-realized; the clowns themselves are accomplished with nicely articulated and textured cable-controlled masks. And those effects in which realism breaks down are instantly forgiven — after all, clowns and circus hoopla are supposed to look garish and fake.

HEY! Watch the hands there, big guy!

The movie stops short of being a full-fledged classic simply because that’s one of the limits of intentional camp; there’s always that winking knowledge that someone went to a lot of trouble to make things look this goofy and outrageous. But Killer Klowns offends a lot less in that regard than, say, every single movie ever produced by Troma Studios.