Every week, we spotlight a kill that we just can’t get enough of. This is Kill of the Week.
Before he made Spider-Man: Homecoming, now out in theaters and garnering rave reviews from almost everyone, Jon Watts made his feature debut with a film that was a whole lot less family friendly than his foray into the Marvel Comics world. Believe it or not, the man who directed the new Spider-Man movie also directed CLOWN!
To make a long story short, Clown began its life as a faux trailer that Jon Watts put together back in 2010. The trailer advertised that the fake movie was an Eli Roth film, which caught the attention of Roth. This led Roth to partner with Watts on turning the trailer into an actual movie in 2014, which was finally released Stateside last year.
One year later, Watts brings freakin’ Spider-Man back to the screen. How crazy is that?!
The wacky premise of Clown is that a father puts on a clown suit for his son’s birthday and finds himself unable to take it off; he soon begins developing a hunger for children, all while literally transforming into a demonic clown. As absurd as the concept may be, Watts mostly plays it with a straight face, resulting in a movie that’s both wildly entertaining and incredibly dark.
Yes, the titular clown actually kills children. Several of them.
One of the key set-pieces takes place in a Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurant, where the unwillingly villainous Kent McCoy feasts on not one but two kids. He devours the first kid in the ball pit, entirely off-screen, but things get way more gruesome when he lures another into the jungle gym. He tears into the unlucky kid, and though we only see brief glimpses of what’s actually happening, we see enough – he rips the kid limb from limb, tearing his body completely in half.
Blood then pours down the yellow slide… so does one of the kid’s arms.
The horror movies of today often don’t quite push the boundaries that they did back in the ’80s, which made Clown such a refreshing watch for me last year. Back in the ’80s, it seemed like all bets were off. ANYTHING could happen… and it often did. Clown takes much the same approach, pulling no punches in an effort to make what I personally believe to be the ultimate killer clown horror movie.
Clown is original, bold and inventive, catering directly to those of us who watch horror movies to see crazy, taboo-smashing shit that we simply can’t find anywhere else.
And the Chuck E. Cheese massacre, well, it’s a great example of precisely that.
