The October Zombie-Thon - Day 22: Dead Clowns

Posted by Trevor Snyder on 10.22.2008

Not really any creepier than living clowns...

DEAD CLOWNS (2003)



Written & Directed by: Steve Sessions
Country: USA

It was mixed emotion that I went into today's movie. On the one hand, it's called Dead Clowns, and I'd be lying if I said that didn't perk my interest right off the bat. Even just the mental image of a bunch of undead clowns, perhaps ravaging a particularly annoying young child's birthday party, was enough to bring a smile to my face, so the movie already had that going for it.

On the other hand, as I thought about it I realized my "clown horror" bar has been set awfully high, thanks to Tim Curry's wicked, iconic performance as Pennywise in Stephen King's It, not to mention the ridiculous but undeniably enjoyable guilty-pleasures of Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Two very different experiences, to be sure, but both had at least led me to expect a certain level of quality from my killer clown films. Could a movie like Dead Clowns ever hope to live up to these high standards?

Nope.

Don't get me wrong, it's not like Dead Clowns is a failure only when stacked up against other evil clown movies. No, in fact, Dead Clowns is a failure on pretty much every imaginable level. I suspect that even if somebody has somehow never seen a movie in their entire life, and this was the first one they watched, then even that person – with no frame of reference to compare it to - would probably still end up saying "wow, that was really terrible."

The "story" (as it were) concerns the coastal town of Port Emmett, where during a hurricane years ago a reckless tugboat captain managed to ram his ship right into a bridge support, derailing a circus train passing by on the tracks above. The clown car plunged into the ocean, drowning all its occupants, and neither the car nor the bodies were ever recovered. Because the tugboat captain belonged to one of the towns more influential families he was never punished, and the entire incident was swept under the rug…soon forgotten except as a sort of local legend for the town's residents to whisper about on stormy nights.

Mind you, we don't actually get to see any of the above events play out. No flashbacks here - instead, we know it's all true because we hear the story told in its entirety…not once, but twice, from two separate characters at two completely different points in the movie. Did writer/director Steve Sessions somehow forget he had already made us sit through this exposition once before? It's not like it's a long movie or anything. I'm pretty sure the tale is still fresh in our head by the time the second telling rolls around.

And why wouldn't it be? It's not like there anything else going on to distract us. OK, sure, there is the little manner of the dead clowns suddenly returning from their watery graves to seek revenge on the residents during a hurricane (I'm not sure if they had to wait for another hurricane to be able to come back, or if they just thought it would look cooler if they did). But I don't want to give the impression that a gang of flesh-eating zombies on the loose means that anything is actually happening in this movie. Far from it…this is one of the most interminably dull films you will ever encounter. The film's first act introduces us to a whole slew of featured characters, and once the clowns show up we keep waiting for at least some of these characters to meet one another and start fighting back. But it just…never…happens.

Instead, the entire movie is nothing more than a series of vignettes, mostly consisting of our various characters wandering around their houses, seeing a zombie, and then being "chased" (a relative term here, since no one ever bothers to pick up their pace to anything above a jog, even when confronted with certain death) and eventually devoured by said zombie. And I'm not exaggerating for the sake of humor – scream queen legend Debbie Rochon (who deserves far better than this crap) doesn't even get to say a single word in the entire movie - her entire role consists of walking through her hallways and hiding under a staircase when the zombies come calling. And that's it.

To be fair, even something like hiding under a staircase almost counts as breathtaking excitement in a movie like this, considering how much early screen-time is squandered on boring filler like watching characters prepare their homes for the hurricane. Listen here, Sessions - no amount of creepy, ominous music on the soundtrack can make watching people put up storm windows or take out their contacts interesting.

At times, it almost feels like Sessions is openly mocking the idea of traditional story acts and character development, which – if I thought for a moment was at all true – could be almost admirable, if not for how unbearably dreadful the resultant product is. It takes 20 minutes for anything of interest to happen, but any hope that things might be picking up is quickly dashed by how boring these "dead clowns" are. And about that…it doesn't even matter in the long run that they are clowns. I imagined the whole point of this idea was to exploit the obviously absurd idea of undead clowns, but – apart from their outfits and the amusingly out-of-place calliope music that signals their presence – these are just your typical, run-of-the-mill living dead. This movie could have just as easily been Dead Mechanics and it wouldn't have changed a damn thing.

If it sounds like I'm getting angry, it's only because I am. Calling the notion of zombie clowns a "can't-miss" scenario might be a little bit of a stretch, but there's no denying that it could have been handled a lot better than this. Sessions makes the wrong storytelling call at pretty much every turn. For instance, we learn early on that scream-queen Brinke Stevens (who – after Zombiegeddon and Corpses Are Forever – has earned her spot in the Zombie-Thon Hall of Shame by now appearing in an unbelievably shitty movie all three years) is the daughter of the tugboat captain responsible for the clowns' tragedy. You would think that would make her the default main character, right? Me too…but instead she's one of the first cast members taken out of the picture. The main "hero" role actually ends up going to an on-the-run criminal, who has recently killed a priest and is simply passing through town. Even though he is an outsider, he's the only person who actually figures out how to stop the zombies; and believe me when I say it's one of the more laughable solutions ever offered in the genre (awww, the zombies just want to be remembered…how precious), made even more silly by the "shocking twist" tacked onto the end.

Even after all this, I'm still not adverse to the general idea of zombie clowns. I think there's still a lot of potential there (somewhat hinted at in one brief but amusing scene in George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead). I just hope the next time they come around, it's in the hands of someone with a little better grasp on what they're doing than Mr. Sessions.

FINAL SCORE: 0 out of 4 Bubs (Avoid At All Costs)