In this Eli Roth movie a real estate salesman dad plays substitute clown when the clown for his 7-year-old son’s birthday party cancelled. Cancelled DURING the party, like “where are you?” and “sorry can’t make it, no costumed performers for YOUR kid this year!”
Not something I can identify with. I think I had two birthday parties my entire childhood, neither one involved paid professionals, because 1, my parents were teachers not real estate douchebags in swanky neighborhoods and 2, I didn’t like clowns. Not that I was afraid of them, I just didn’t find them interesting. Bring me a basket full of puppies to run around the yard and I’m beyond happy, but a clown? Clowns are for selling cheeseburgers and keeping rodeo riders from getting stomped to death. Oh and for killing people. Clowns like to kill people.
Dad finds a clown costume in a trunk in the attic of a house he’s selling, in what would be an encyclopedia example of “dumb luck.”
…encyclopedias were a set of books back when people bought reference books to keep in their house. Probably a bizarre concept to many readers, just try to imagine a hardcopy of Wikipedia that took up a good 26 inches of bookshelf space and was around 15 years outdated, and was never updated to include a unified Germany and a food pyramid that wasn’t 75% bread, because the set cost a good thousand dollars in 2024 money. So if “dumb luck” had a quarter page in the “D” volume, this clown costume is the photo. Or is it?
DunDunDUNNN!!
So it’s a haunted clown costume that doesn’t come off. The nose is stuck, the wig is stuck, he tries cutting the suit off with a Sawzall and nothing doin’. Stuck! Trapped in a haunted clown suit. This begs the question… when Eli Roth wrote “Cabin Fever” he was inspired by personal experience contracting a flesh-eating disease, so what on Earth happened to him in life that inspired him to write a movie about a suburban dad getting trapped in a cursed clown suit??
Dad guy finds an expert on haunted clown costumes (I wonder how many Yelp reviews there are for something like that) who explains that modern clowns are descended from a Scandinavian clown monster who ate Medieval children all winter long. Then the expert tries to kill him. Twice. As it turns out, the haunted costume has a story (because if it didn’t, this would be a terribly boring horror movie) and suburban dad is going to turn into a demonic clown monster. No balloon animals, no tiny car, no pies in the face. Just Satanic murders and child sacrifice. Basically a very bad clown.
Clowndad’s saint of a wife believes the crazy story, and tries to figure out a way to de-clown her husband, enlisting the help of the expert in evil clown costumes. Costume expert tells a quick back story, and then they go out searching. Now, where would a hungry clownmonster go to get a full belly?
I’ve never been to a Chuck E Cheese, but if the movie is at all accurate I gather that it’s a place where unsupervised children run around screaming, and that’s it. It’s just a big chaotic scream room. Do I have that right? Give them some video game tokens, fill them with sugar and then turn the little psychos loose. Looks great. Stop me if I ever suggest going there.
Expert wants to chop clowndad’s head off, clowndad says “Nah don’t bother, just get me one more kid to eat and I’ll call it quits. I just need to eat one more kid.” Right, how many times have you heard your child’ahollic friends say that? But okay hon’, I’ll go get you a child, then you can eat that child in front of me and we can go back to being a family again, no lasting emotional trauma whatsoever. Oh cool, here’s one, we invited her to that birthday party. Kid owes us one.
Kid gets away, so we chop off dad’s head. The end.
Some clever reviewer, don’t know who but don’t care, decided this was a movie about a suburban dad battling with his pedophilic tendencies, dressed up as a killer clown body horror movie (executive produced by Harvey Weinstein), when in reality it was just Eli Roth’s version of The Fly but with a killer clown (executive produced by Harvey Weinstein). The origin is that of some nerds on the internet making up a fake movie trailer and claiming it was an Eli Roth project. Roth said “Sure, fuck it, I’ll direct that” and this is how movies are made.
Middle-of-the-road movie. Doesn’t suck, but doesn’t knock my socks off.