Written and Directed by Steve Sessions
Featuring Debbie Rochon, Lucien Eisenach, Jeff Dylan Graham, Brinke Stevens, Robyn Griggs, Kimberly L. Cole, Eric Spudic, Jenn Ruliffson, Brandon Carroll
USA
95 mins
Lionsgate Films

Fifty years ago in Port Emmett, a bridge collapsed during a hurricane and it plunged a train carrying a circus into the dark depths of the bay. Attempts to recover the train carriage that carried the clowns were unsuccessful and the hurricane had washed silt and mud over it, making any future recovery attempts impossible. The people of the town decided to forget about it and left the clowns in their burial ground in the bay. But now with another hurricane approaching, calliope music fills the air as the clowns come back to extract their revenge upon the descendants of those who left them to rot.

Lillian (the smoky voiced Brinke Stevens) tells her husband the tragic tale and reveals that the tugboat captain who caused the accident after drinking heavily, was her father!

The conversation in the opening had me laughing! She says something along the lines of, “That was nothing compared to what happened to the tug boat captain!” and her husband says, “What happened to the tugboat captain?” She gives a serious yet distant look and says, “Nothing.”

I just about died laughing.

Dead Clowns: not a lot of nudity, not a lot of screaming and really, not a lot of blood. But there IS creepiness and goo. The clowns were dark and viscous from their time underwater, and they oozed black stuff from broken skulls, eye sockets, and decayed mouths. Some had seaweed and miscellaneous dangling all over. They had half eaten heads and they were missing eyes and noses... What had been striking about this film is the quietness of it. The hurricane winds could be heard, the calliope music could be heard, but there had been barely any screaming, there were no loud fight scenes, and it makes for a weird bedfellow with the visuals because you see a clown slice a man’s arm off (Jeff Dylan Graham) and then sit down and eat it, right in front of him!

The parts I found creepiest are: when wheelchair bound Timmy (portrayed by Eric Spudic) climbs out of his wheelchair and drags himself to a hiding spot, chased by a gurgling dead clown. When the clown tries to find him, it stops right in front of the place where Timmy hid and steps out of view into some dark corner. Timmy waits and keeps an eye on the slits of the metal grating that separates him from certain death.  When someone comes looking for him, Timmy keeps quiet as the man looking for him is snatched up by the clown and is dragged away for snacking.

The scene with Debbie Rochon, where she is running through her house away from a clown and she ends up in her basement area; the clown searches the house thoroughly and even comes down the cellar stairs, where Debbie is hiding beneath. When the clown is satisfied that she is not down there, he leaves. Debbie ventures out only to be discovered when the clown finds an alternate door in the floor boards and twists his head around (like an owl) to look between his knees and he sees her. That was pretty creepy cool.

Oh, does anyone like eye-gouges? I do! There is a scene where a clown holds this girl down and he takes a meat thermometer...well, it must be seen to be believed.

Dead Clowns has its killer moments, but on a general whole, there was a lot more that could be done with it. I must speculate that if they were clowns, what would have creeped me out and made me laugh at the same time (because, hey, they’re clowns) is that the clowns would have twisted the people into shapes, like balloon animals. That would have been wild. For what it is though, I enjoyed it. If clowns give you the willies, I would suggest watching this. Because if you think living clowns are scary, wait until you run into a troop of dead ones! Dead ZOMBIE clowns!

Is that calliope music I hear?