GoMovieReviews Rating: ★★★ 
Rated: MA15+
Directed by: Eli Craig
Screenplay by: Carter Blanchard and Eli Craig
Based on the Novel by: Adam Cesare
Produced by: Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner, John Fischer, Paris Kassidokostas-Latsis, Terry Dougas
Starring: Katie Douglas, Aaron Abrams, Carson MacCormac, Vincent Muller, Kevin Durand and Will Sasso.
‘Hey, check it out. It’s Frendo.’
A tongue-in-cheek teen slasher, Clown in a Cornfield begins in 1991.
There’s a first person point-of-view of walking through, yep, a cornfield.
There’s a party around a fire that has classic living-in-the-country teens getting drunk and making out.
But at this party there’s a wind-up toy.
A clown pops out of a box.
The girl holding the box catches a guy’s attention, giving him the come-hither, meet-me-in-the-cornfield look.
He follows.
‘What the fuck shoesize do you have?!’
Says the guy wanting to get high but happy enough to follow the girl taking her top off amongst the corn, only to find on the ground the imprint of a ginormous clown shoe.
Did I mention the tongue-in-cheek?
A silence.
A crow caws.
The blood splatter begins.
Fast forward to ‘Now’ and you have Quinn (Katie Douglas) reminding her dad (Aaron Abrams) singing 80s rap that the 80s for her is what the 40s would be for him.
That’s perspective for Dr. Maybrook, moving his daughter to a flyover country town to become the new GP.
But it’s a dying town. The corn syrup factory, Baypen with Frendo the clown as its mascot, has closed leaving the townspeople desperate, yearning for the time when things were good. Otherwise known as, The good ol’ days.
The first thing Quinn asks local red-neck, but polite neighbour, Rust (Vincent Muller) is, What do you do around here for fun?
It’s Federation Day tomorrow.
He warns, be careful of the weirdos.
It doesn’t take long for Quinn to meet the rebels of the school: Cole (Carson MacCormac), Matt (Alexandre Martin Deakin), Tucker (Ayo Solanke), Ronnie (Verity Marks) and Janet (Cassandra Potenza).
Pranking the teacher because he hates them so they hate him more.
Cole tells Quinn about the traditions of the town, how they keep entertained, and there’s enough to keep the film interesting with added funny bits like asides from Ronnie, ‘I’m seventeen-years-old and already hit rock bottom.’
It’s a teen movie taking the piss out of teens, here the humour is making fun of Gen Z. But you get where the teens are coming from, even if they don’t know how to use a dial phone or how to drive a manual car.
And this is a difference in the slasher formula, using the Gen Z traits to highlight the current generation gap to make a horror movie funny.
Director Eli Craig states he wanted to hang the film on something more than just teens getting slashed, so he, ‘Went to the source — Adam Cesár’s fast paced novel the script was based on — and found it was really saying something about the generational divide that much of the country, if not the world, faces today. It holds a mirror up to the American dream; exposing the warped facade of capitalism gone wrong and the rage that comes from being on the losing end of it.’
Craig also states that the film was made on a tight budget, ‘The challenge was fraught from the start; with a tiny fraction of the budget we actually needed to make this work — a mere $6.5 million.’
So telling the story relied heavily on the actors – Katie Douglas as Quinn holding her own and able to make her character likable while embracing the character’s teen antics.
And I liked the camera work (Brian Pearson), the fading from watching a video on a screen to being put in the video to be part of the story to amp the scare.
I wouldn’t say there’s tension or much of a backstory, but there are surprises and jumps – a movie goer sitting in front of me literally jumped, throwing popcorn because of a scare.
So it’s kinda fun because the film can make fun of itself and be funny, on purpose, in between the creepy bits.
