KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE
I feel so vulnerable!

  What the hell is wrong with me?  I'm not eight years old anymore, I shouldn't be creeped out by something like this.

Totally goofball from beginning til end, KKFOS concerns one of your standard movie-issue American small towns which witnesses the landing of a meteorite, or something.  (the old porch-sittin' guy who first rushes out to investigate does a hilariously first-class imitation of Jim Siedow in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2)  At the landing site is, of all things, a circus tent - and its inhabitants, for whatever reason, are intent on capturing the entire town and entombing its residents in cotton candy!

The methods these freaky-lookin' clowns use to basically make people stand around slack-jawed long enough to "get" them are good for some chuckles.  They'll do anything to make you stand still that long: puppet shows, candygrams, shadow puppets (watch out for that...too late).  And the only people that can stop them are, that's right, a couple of local teenagers and the only cop who believes them.

John Vernon's here, chewing scenery everywhere, playing a cop who isn't so trusting.  I doubt you've ever seen anybody else here before.  The real stars are the clowns and the sets and props they bring with them (like the funhouse interior of the spaceship-tent, or the popcorn-gun, or...you name it, if it can be associated with clowns, it's here and it's deadly).

The low-budget effects are plentiful and enjoyable; I particularly liked the carnivorous shadow puppets, and of course a hilarious scene where one clown deals with an entirely deserving troupe of bikers.  And you know how some things are funny simply BECAUSE you know what's coming, instead of in spite of it?  There's a lot of that here, like when four people inside the spaceship-tent each pass this prominent red button, and the first guy ignores it, and the second, and...yeah, you got it.  By this point, I was giggling myself silly.

KKFOS is an outrageously goofy movie, but its villains are so nasty looking that I found myself with a case of the willies by about the 60-minute mark.  Their mouths, they're so big!  And their teeth, so sharp!  Yeah, so their Achilles' Heel is the second silliest I've ever seen (behind that of the aliens in Mars Attacks!); I dunno guys, maybe it's like some unstated fear of clowns I have which I refuse to face.  But those are some ugly, creepy clowns.

So yeah, this movie's fun.  It's PG, so claims of it being tame rather miss the point.  I might've wanted more nudity in that shower scene, but hey, a bunch of slithering clown-heads is pretty cool too.   I wish Mars Attacks! had been half this enjoyable.

After the credits is the more-80's-than-the-80's video for the title song by The Dickies, whose singer sings like a woman, talks like a man, and looks like both.

BACK TO MAIN PAGE BACK TO THE K's