Movies
Secrets of the Clown
“Everybody loves killer clowns and naked tits, so SECRETS OF THE CLOWN already has a built-in fan base; too bad the narrative gets tangled in its own rainbow shoelaces and hits the dirt at about the 45 minute mark.”
Under normal circumstances I’d admire and appreciate a B-movie auteur beginning and ending his horror opus with two different sets of naked titties, but unfortunately Ryan Badalamenti’s SECRETS OF THE CLOWN is the exception to the rule. The first set of fake circus tits (perhaps a sly reference to the film’s title) comes at in at a brave 38-second mark, as a topless girl and her beefcake boyfriend are awakened by the sounds of a break-in, only to be quickly dispatched by a clown wielding a knife and some unnecessarily loud “jump” sound effects.
After this titillating prologue, Badalamenti settles into his meandering, convoluted plot. Val and Bobby are a volatile couple that seem to enjoy breaking up at a moment’s notice, without much in the way of explanation. Val is haunted by clown visions, and she openly and creepily relishes a clown doll from her childhood. Val has a particularly spooky clown vision which seems like enough reason to dump Bobby’s ass; as a result, Bobby ends up hitting the bottle pretty hard with his friend Jim. In a moment of recklessness, Jim picks up a bottle of liquor and smashes the feet of Val’s clown doll, a huge no-no in the SECRETS OF THE CLOWN world. A few moments later, while catching a smoke on the front porch, Jim gets his insides jacked up by the clown-slasher’s knife. You know, until he dies.
Bobby gathers with a bunch of his childhood buddies at Jim’s gravesite a month later and they all make a pact to find out who murdered their friend. Well, except for one of the buddies, who gets killed by the clown while waiting out in his car. This additional murder sends Bobby and his boys on a long-winded and frequently boring investigation to find out the true identity of the killer. The clown doll seems to be somehow involved, Val may be involved, everybody’s a suspect when it comes to not-so-scary clown murders.
Although not entirely inept, SECRETS OF THE CLOWN suffers from a silly script, obnoxious musical cues, and acting that is all over the map. Bobby (Paul Piero) has exactly one facial expression, the Adrian Brody Plaintive Deluxe, and it gets old quickly. The low-budget gore is one of the highlights of the films; sadly, all of the kill scenes are staged in the most generic, white-bread manner possible. It looks like there was enough fake blood to go around, but it’s all cosmetically spread around the murder scenes like a Bob Ross painting, whereas some crazy-ass, murder-reenactment spattering would have been more aesthetically pleasing. I know it’s nitpicking, but SECRETS OF THE CLOWN is a decent premise undermined by its complete lack of attention to detail. Everybody loves killer clowns and naked tits, so SECRETS OF THE CLOWN already has a built-in fan base; too bad the narrative gets tangled in its own rainbow shoelaces and hits the dirt at about the 45 minute mark.
Described as “Ted meets ET,” David Mikalson’s raunchy comedy Goblin is being brought to life over at A24, and Will Forte (“The Four Seasons”) is now in talks to star.
Deadline first reported the news this afternoon.
Kenneth Branagh has been cast to voice the titular Goblin in the upcoming A24 movie, with the character said to be “green-colored” as well as “anatomically correct.”
Skyler Gisondo (Superman) is reportedly playing the Goblin’s human best friend.
The mysterious project sounds a bit like films including A Gnome Named Gnorm and more recently, Frankie Freako, though it’s important to note that it’s not billed as a horror movie.
Deadline details, “After [Mikalson] hatched the idea to make an outrageous buddy comedy about a goblin, using a practical puppet and operating outside the Hollywood system, his script quickly got him a rep team. While others might have eyed the raunchy comedy as a writing sample or planned to wait to see the micro-budget version Mikalson has been directing in Kentucky, A24 jumped all over it. The hot indie essentially has agreed to finance a full feature.”
“There was a lot of interest, but A24 came with what Mikalson really wanted, after spending all his money crafting the puppet title character: they acquired the movie and agreed to let him make it with a significantly increased budget than what he had left after creating the anatomically correct title character,” Deadline’s report goes on to explain.
What does the titular Goblin actually look like? Well, a cake that Mikalson had whipped up for his reps might give us our first look at what to expect. Deadline explains the photo you’ll see down below, “Take a look at the cake he commissioned with Marc Gravelle at Cake Art in West Hollywood, to present to his reps as thanks for making his dream come true.”
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