Killer Klowns from Outer Space

The movie exists. Coulrophobia is real. Clowns are creepy. Killer Klowns from Outer Space extends from these salients. It would have to.

Merriam Webster defines coulrophobia as an irrational fear of clowns. I say nothing is irrational about that fear. At their best, clowns are unsettling. Also, the esteemed dictionary cannot cite a satisfying derivation of the word, which first appeared in 1998.

Killer Klowns appeared in the 80s. It exhibits a modest budget, with John Vernon of Animal House the only actor I’d heard of. The movie shows the hallmarks of a teen flick—I will offer the 1980s as the Golden Age of Teen Flicks. Instead of hijinks, however, the movie registers a surprising degree of scary malice.

The story begins with a couple of young people making out in a car (teen flick!). They see something flash thru the sky and go to investigate. An old coot (from central casting) also sees the flash and does likewise. He reaches the object first, a bright, colourful, tent-like thing. As he looks around both he and his dog are disappeared. An air of boding remains.

The young couple come along and gain entrance to the tent thing. They find abundant cotton candy and popcorn inside, and a brightly colourful circus decor. Checking out the cotton candy, they find a person within the cocoon-like mass of the stuff. They then encounter a clown.

Here we reach the key to the movie’s power. This being, clearly an alien, looks like a clown in brightly coloured clown regalia. That’s bad enough but the clown quality isn’t quite right. The skin of the creature is weirdly wrinkled and it’s teeth are disturbingly crammed and jostled within the mouth. Malice seems to emanate from the creature, especially from the eyes.

The clown pursues the young people, throwing popcorn at them as well as shooting a ray gun. It also fashions a dog out of balloons, which then becomes animate and chases after the young people. The young people manage to get in their car, hit the clown, and get away. The clown gets to its feet after the car roars off.

The movie splits here, with the young people trying to get help being one plot line, and the visitation of the Klowns in the town. The young couple go to the police where the woman has a friend. He’s a young college grad who therefore finds himself at odds with John Vernon’s older cop. Vernon is great, overflowing with cranky malice of his own.

The rampage, to call it that, of Klowns thru the city supplies a number of creepy, unsettling set pieces amidst the town’s population. In one, a short Klown riding a small, colourful motor bike meets a biker gang. A biker picks on him and destroys his bike. With one punch, the Klown knocks the biker’s head off. In another scene, people are gathered at a pizza joint. A young girl at the table notices a Klown outside. The Klown beckons her. Oh dear! She reaches the door but her mother shepherds her back. All the other encounters end with someone dying, usually encased in that cotton candy stuff. Somewhere along the way we are informed, or the inference made, that the Klown’s will eat their victims.

The young cop comes to believe something is up, to the disgust of the John Vernon character. The two young men decide to go back to the alien ship. They take the young woman home first. She takes a shower. Some of that popcorn stuff tumbled off her clothes. These turn into Gremlin-like creatures from which she luckily escapes.

At the station, the older cop continues to fume about the hoaxsters who have been calling in about killer clowns. One enters the station...

The young cop and young guy find a Klown doing extraordinary shadow figures against a wall, to the delight of a small crowd. His hands have three fingers and a thumb, like in cartoons. A figure of a Tyrannosaurus rex suddenly swallows the crowd. Yikes! Our heroes get away.

The cop returns to the station, where things don’t look right. He finds the Klown sitting at the desk with the older cop on his lap. Malevolence is palpable. The older cop speaks, tho clearly dead, as if a ventriloquist dummy. This was foreshadowed earlier when he says something like, Do they take me for a dummy? The Klown removes its hand from the cop’s back with a creepy squishy sound and pushes the body aside. He comes for the young cop. Bullets have no effect until one hits the klown’s big red nose, at which point it explodes in a dazzling display.

The young guy meanwhile recruits two buffoons to go save the abducted girlfriend. The buffoons are comic relief, if you want to call it that. Their buffoonery hits the half-assed level of teen flicks. The remaining cop joins up with the other four. A gigantic master Klown appears and just about finishes the cop. Luckily he manages a shot to the giant’s nose which destroys the giant and the ship. The end.

One gets the idea that somebody woke from a dream with the idea for this movie. Robert Louis Stevenson claims that “Dr Jeckel and Mr Hyde” developed from a dream. The unwholesomeness of clowns agitate all of us. But whereas clowns are, as characters, bumbling or sad, these Klowns bring malice and malevolence. They murder playfully.

I am bound to appreciate a movie that has an idea, and surges with it. Movies often no longer seem creative. Certainly franchise movies, however they began, become the work of bookkeepers. I appreciate films in which we see evidence that the filmmaker stepped off the path a bit.