Clown in a Cornfield
Clown in a Cornfield
Starring Katie Douglas, Aaron Abrams, Carson MacCormac, Vincent Muller
Directed by Eli Craig
After the death of her mother, Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas) and her father Glenn (Aaron Abrams) move from Philadelphia to the small town of Kettle Springs, Missouri, where Glenn got a job as the town's doctor. Quinn meets the quirky neighbor kid Rust (Vincent Muller) and then interacts with a gang of kids in school that are seen by the adults as delinquents - Cole (Caron MacCormac), Janet (Cassandra Potenza), Ronnie (Verity Marks), Tucker (Ayo Solanke), and Matt (Alexandre Martin Deakin). They take Quinn in under their wing and show her their passion: making viral videos centering on the town's mascot Frendo the Clown, who made a name for itself in Kettle Springs by being the mascot of the Baypen Corn Syrup Factory which went defunct when the building caught on fire. They make Frendo a killer, and soon they're stalked by Frendo in real life, stopping at nothing to make sure the kids are taken care of.
It's really hard to describe "Clown in a Cornfield" without going into spoilers, and the trailer itself gives away one of the movie's most hilarious moments (I actually didn't see the trailer beforehand, so I found myself laughing so hard at that scene), but the movie feels like a blend of "Children of the Corn," "Thanksgiving," and "It" in decent ways, but never fully reaching its full potential.
It almost doesn't seem fair to hold this in such high esteem, because it essentially does what it sets out to do - provide gory kills with a scary-looking killer. What made it less for me was the opening half. It's formulaic when we see a city girl and her father dealing with family trauma moving to a tight-knit small town where they're on the outside, coming to terms with their new lives and people around them. At least Katie Douglas gives a great performance as Quinn, the essential "Final Girl" in the film, and makes her rootable and likable - and even more empowered than most females in this role (she falls hard for the bad boy Cole, and initiates the romance between the two).
It's interesting to see the friend group here both matches the stereotypes of kids in these horror movies but also bends them slightly. We got the bad boy Cole, the mean girl Janet, the ditzy Ronnie, the jock Matt, and the token black guy Tucker, but these kids aren't all that bad - they actually seem to really enjoy being around Quinn, and aren't insufferable caricatures (except one baffling scene where Quinn has it out with Janet, but then they're immediately friends again). The film is strengthened by these characters being actually likable if not generic, and their kills are impressive, gory, and a lot of fun.
It's when the last half starts that everything comes to a head. A party at a small isolated barn is threatened by the arrival of Frendo, and the kills and laughter arrive in spades. They skewer the film they're in (Ronnie, the African American girl, even says she's probably going to die first) while offering commentary on being young in a world that seems to have stopped before they were born (with the aforementioned joke in the trailer being the film's main laughing point).
The film then hits one speed bump with the final reveal and the generic killer's monologue, which serves so much exposition it really doesn't make a lot of sense if you think about it, but I guess it needed to be there for anything to remotely make sense - at least in their eyes, because, again, the plan doesn't really make sense to me. Still, despite that, the film's overall concept is a fun one, with great kills, enjoyable characters and opens the discussion on what it means to be young and old and the barrier between the two - if only it had that last extra "umph" to make it more memorable.
The Score: B+
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