Horrorfest 2012: Killer Klowns from Outer Space

KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE is a movie I remember seeing on video store shelves for years as a kid, but never got around to actually watching it until just now.

It's about what you'd expect -- a spoof of the paranoid sci-fi/horror flick in which invaders come from beyond the stars to capture/destroy humanity, and it's up to a group of kids to inform the authorities, who won't listen. Only this time, the alien invaders happen to look like circus clowns and have a spaceship that looks like a circus tent. The cocoons they trap their victims in look like cotton candy and their laser guns shoot popcorn. Am I forgetting anything? Oh yeah -- they also have balloon animal bloodhounds.

This movie works mostly because of the acting -- Grant Cramer stars as the lead teenager (or twenty-something? Hard to tell in these movies) and sets the tone with the right balance of "gee whiz" naivete and "aw shucks" incredulousness. He teams up with a local good-guy cop (John Allen Nelson) to rescue their mutual girlfriend (Suzanne Snyder) from the invading Klowns. John Vernon is on hand as a cranky cop who refuses to believe in the invasion, and Michael Siegel and Peter Licassi appear as a pair of horny brothers who hatch a scheme to drive an ice cream truck in an effort to get chicks. Whether or not they succeed I'll leave up to you to discover.

I think the star of this movie was meant to be the effects, and they did lead to a career for the team of writer/director/producer/everything else brothers, the Chiodos. There are a lot of inventive and effectively executed special effects scenes, but the Klowns themselves probably look better in stills than they do in motion.

To their credit, the Chiodo Brothers fully exploit their premise. They do not fall into the all-too-easy trap of coming up with a great premise and then failing to deliver. Instead, the milk the idea of killer clowns for all it is worth, checking off each clown cliche dutifully as they move along, from pies in the face all the way to clown cars. I guess that's the most important thing for a viewer of weird, low budget cult films -- you don't want to feel like you care more about the movie than the makers do. And it is clear the Chiodo Brothers put everything into KILLER KLOWNS.