Dead Clowns (2003)

The greatest movie ever!

It is a performances centric movie

Absolutely the worst movie.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Holy f**k, this film is terrible. As stated above, nothing happens throughout the dread-filled hour and a half. First off, you kill off Brinke Stevens without even giving her a decent roll; given me a break. Then for the rest of the film we're treated to several characters with little to no personalities. This movie makes me f*****g sick. Not just because it's terrible, but because it's not even a good kind of terrible. You take a premise of dead clowns that come back to kill off everyone in their sight and you have the possibility of a nice little campy film. Utter bull***t; Everyone dies, the clowns win at the last second, whatever.

Stay away from this movie. The filmmakers don't know the first thing about creating suspense or fright. Why wouldn't you have the actors scream? They're being attacked by zombie clowns, for frick's sake! One guy wouldn't even scream as his arm was being sawed off. Maybe the actor knew how horrid the movie was right from the get-go. The pacing is ludicrously slow and plodding. No one is going to be scared by this or even find this entertaining. I love my zombie movies and was looking forward to this as the mythology of it seemed amazing. Clowns left to die under water. Very cool. But it's this script should've been left there. That would've been cooler.I know I gave this 1 out of ten but that's only because I couldn't find the -36 on the scale.

This movie was terrible.Now, I'm a cheesy horror fan as much as the next person, and I can certainly appreciate a good low-budget gore-fest. But this movie? Low-budget: yes. Gory? Hardly.I have never been so utterly bored in my life waiting for something to happen. After looooooong and beyond pointless shots of stock-footage hurricanes, looooooong and beyond pointless shots of random people walking slowly around looking at things like they've never seen them before... ("wow.... I'm in my house but... this wall... it's just... fascinating... I'm going to.... stroll past it... and stare... wow..."), and some kid snorting sugar -er- cocaine, the movie finally did something interesting.No, wait, that was just me hitting the forward search button in an effort to get to this gore I was promised. Well, I want my 30 minutes back. Terrible, terrible effects. Stupid rubber masks, bad fake blood, HORRIBLE acting (and yes, I realize with a crappy indie horror, that's to be expected, but the acting in this garbage was utterly atrocious on EVERYONE'S part except for Brinke Stevens. She was relatively convincing, especially compared to the rest of the drivel she was put up beside), bad bad bad sound, and just, GAH. It was so frickin' bad. I had to turn it off because my head was getting ready to explode from the lame crap I was seeing.Thank the gods I did not pay for this crap. Even so, I think I am owed compensation for putting myself through even part of this. Yeah, that's right. That moron should be paying people to watch this.And even then, I would have trouble agreeing.

In Dead Clowns, Lions Gate Entertainment demonstrates once again that their distribution wing is located several stories below the barrel that other studios only dare to scrape the bottom of. First allow me to set the stage by quoting from the marvelous plot synopsis located on the back of the packet: "As a hurricane approaches the small coastal town of Port Emmett, an innocent group of residents are {sic} visited by an unspeakable horror. Fifty years ago a bridge collapsed in the small town, plunging a circus train into the dark water below. The clown car was never recovered. {emphasis mine} Tonight the zombie clowns emerge from the bay to exact revenge on the descendants of those who left them buried under the silt and mud for half a century." Given that this synopsis contains the immortal phrase "The clown car was never recovered", which causes me to erupt with spontaneous laughter every time I hear it, rest assured that I was not expecting a high quality piece of entertainment. What I was expecting (unfortunately for me) was some piece of entertainment...Dead Clowns starts with a ponderous lead-in filled with insistent nature shots, which neither reinforce the important fact that a hurricane is supposed to be coming, nor even adhere to any particular continuity concerning the time of day. The ostensible purpose of these scenes is actually to introduce the audience to our cast of low-rent victims, but Brinke Stevens as the adult woman who grew up in Port Emmett, and is now returning to show her husband her home-town, is the only one of particular significance.She will soon be picked off, like everybody else in Dead Clowns, but her role actually serves a purpose. Unable to afford to show the circus train crash, writer-director-composer Steve Sessions opts instead to have Brinke Stevens' character recount the tale to her husband. One gets the impression that Stevens thought they would be cutting away from her monologue, or at least overlaying her with milky stock footage of a train and a few notes of public domain calliope music, but there was nothing. Just Brinke Stevens in a crummy motel room, looking out at the gentle breeze and smattering of raindrops that was standing in for an oncoming hurricane.Eventually, the titular clowns arrive, after some underwater footage showing the cheerfully-clad corpses shuffling through the silt. The clowns themselves look like they might have spent five decades under water, all rot and rubber and no lips. But their clown suits are inexplicably brand new, right down to their white, white gloves. Even in the underwater shots. And somehow they manage to eat the citizens of Port Emmett (quite sloppily, in long drawn-out scenes of cannibalism accompanied by celery-biting, pasta-slurping sound effects) without ever getting blood on their outfits. After chewing his way through a screaming teenager who was spewing blood, a zombie clown still wears an unblemished ruffle around his neck. Did Sessions have to return these clown suits to a rental place after filming? This obviously-shot-on-video effort does nothing to legitimize DV as a medium, nor does it add anything to the recently-bloated zombie genre. At least the actors generally seem to be acting, which puts Dead Clowns solidly ahead of many other LGE offerings, but few of them are successful in their thespian attempts. The utter lack of tension can't be blamed wholly on either the script or the cast, but the two of them together conspire to keep all semblance of fear or suspense (or audience involvement) as far away from the viewing experience as possible. You would think that any director could take the premise "zombie clowns" and make at least one interesting thing happen (be honest, you thought of at least one interesting thing just now, didn't you?) and in this respect, Steve Sessions has managed to deliver a shock.