Directed By Eli Craig

Starring – Katie Douglas, Aaron Abrams, Carson MacCormac

The Plot – Quinn Maybrook (Douglas) and her father (Abrams) have moved to tiny, boring Kettle Springs, to find a fresh start, But what they don’t know is that ever since the Baypen Corn Syrup Factory shut down, Kettle Springs has cracked in half. On one side are the adults, who are desperate to make Kettle Springs great again, and on the other are the kids, who want to have fun, make prank videos, and get out as quick as they can. Kettle Springs is caught in a battle between old and new, tradition and progress. It’s a fight that looks like it will destroy the town. Until Frendo, the Baypen mascot, a creepy clown goes homicidal and decides that the only way for Kettle Springs to grow back is to cull the rotten crop of kids who live there now.

Rated R for bloody horror violence, adult language throughout and teen drinking

Clown in a Cornfield | Official Trailer | Shudder

POSITIVES

Having grown up with Gruesomely grotesque slasher movies of the most campy variety, there’s a real appreciation that I get from someone like Craig, who not only carries over all of the sensibilities in tone from his previous breakthrough hit, “Dale and Tucker Versus Evil”, but also vividly does his homework on the many tropes and cliches of the subgenre that he finds effortlessly natural ways of dispersing throughout the integrity of the engagement. On the former, this is definitely a movie that appreciates both the comedy and horror elements of its distinguishing characteristics, with Craig seamlessly marrying the two in ways that allows each to stand out without essentially decreasing the effectiveness of the other, and though I took issue with the extension of the campy comedy, which I will get to later, I will say that its consistency and apparency throughout the script’s thematic explorations offered endearingly satisfying commentary to the divide in cultures represented so unapologetically in the film, where characters still find naturally demeaning ways to humiliate themselves, despite being chased by a blood-thirsty madman. As for the aforementioned cliches, the first half of the movie, while tediously testing to the interpretation, does garner authenticity in the traditional set-up of a fish-out-of-water slasher story, with framing and established history that paints a false sense of security within the audience, for where they expect it to go, but in reality come to find themselves eventually manipulated by an off-the-rails third act that continuously subverts those expectations. That seems like a great place to transition over to my favorite aspect of the film, being the thematic impulse of generational divide that offered a surprisingly audacious form of social commentary that I otherwise wouldn’t expect from a throwaway slasher movie. This is something that we the audience can pull accordingly from our own world, where the elder generation within the town are every bit assertively obsessive as they are traditionally dependent, while the youthful generation is ideally more progressive in their lifestyles, and even a bit intelligently condensed when it comes to their adaptability to things like empathy and even outdated technology, both of which earned quite a few laughs throughout the engagement. For a slasher script to contain enlightenment in pulling something back from the realities of the real world, is very unorthodox, but the movie’s trio of writers give audiences plenty of thoughtful insight to allure audience engagement, beyond just brutally abrupt kills, and it makes this a bit of a thinking man’s horror film, despite an obviously on-the-nose title and self-aware execution that on a surface level would convey otherwise. Speaking of those kills, there’s plenty of carnage candy for horror hounds to constantly sink their teeth into, with everything from conceptual creativity to buckets of blood bathing the audience on delivering what was essentially promised with a see-what-you-get kind of expectation. Quite honestly, Craig’s direction does leave a bit more to be desired when dressing up the suspense and vulnerability factors for these characters in the depicted world, however the absorbing sound designs and quick-cut editing really work overtime towards attaining enhanced impacts that can be felt even minutes after Frendo has made his unrelenting presence felt, granting entertaining pay-offs to characters who are essentially nothing more than a body count for Craig’s indulgences, without anything in the way of obvious detectability’s in cheapness that lessens the appeal of minimized budget that this production had to work with.

NEGATIVES

However, while I commend “Clown in a Cornfield” for going above and beyond in the bountiful brutality and subverted expectations, the film’s good qualities still have a lot to overcome in frequent hinderances, beginning with the aforementioned tone, which never got as campy with its comedy as I would’ve preferred from this director helming a holiday slasher movie. Considering we’ve recently dined on a movie like Eli Roth’s “Thanksgiving”, which utilized its dialogue and barbaric nature of its established holiday to paint hilarity towards garnering some truly demented concepts with traditionalism, here the gimmick of a clown in the cornfield never feels like it’s explored to its truest and most satirical potential, making the title and concept feel like darts were thrown at a list of possibilities, and these were the two aspects that came up, despite murders and a bulk of the script’s development happening somewhere else entirely from these parties in the corn. Aside from a lack of campiness within the quality of the material, I also found the titular killer clown to be a bit lacking in being described as the next horror icon by more than a few critics, especially once the numbers game starts to set in, and the movie’s big reveal is among the most obvious that any audience will ever accurately predict, as a result of the script showing its hand far too early. Once this apparency takes shape, it not only robs the clown character of all of its mystique and menacing tenacity, but also makes the motivation for those involved feel tougher to believe the longer I think about it, and considering this is actually the far superior act within the three act structure of the movie, as a result of the movie’s first half being entirely too slow and conventionally by the numbers of its genre outline, it really puts a lot of pressure on the movie’s climax that it could never in fairness ever effectively reach both entertaining endearment, leaving the script’s many unfinished arcs within the final act to surmise this inescapably unfulfilling sentiment that I’m quite confident that I won’t be alone on feeling. Yes, I understand that this is the first movie in a proposed trilogy, based on a trilogy of novels of the same name, however I truly think that there were smoother ways of cementing a foundation towards this franchise that simultaneously resolved most of this chapter, while leaving us energized for what’s to come, but I found myself whiffing on both accounts, which in turn paints a gloomy future for a franchise entirely sold by word of mouth. If this isn’t enough, the characters and their ensuing development are nothing special, emitting a cloud of blandness so thickly inescapable that I never even came close to investing towards a single one of them, or their well-beings, in ways that make the physical conflicts spark with some much-needed stakes of losing any of them. To be fair, there is one major twist with the male lead that materializes midway through the film, but it’s never explored in the coinciding with the tenderness of his family feedings in ways that could’ve supplanted meaning and motivation to their established distancing, dropping the ball on any chance of empathetic appeal in a movie that made me feel older by spending so much time with these youthful brats.

OVERALL
“Clown in a Cornfield” certainly doesn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to gruesome slashers, but it does subvert the expectations of the audience during a third act reveal that supplants some surprisingly stirring social commentary to the movie’s buckets of blood, proving that Eli Craig isn’t clowning around when it comes paying homage to the subgenre that he grew up idolizing. While the film delivers everything promised in the depths of its unoriginal title, it’s often conflicted by its lack of not pushing the creatively campy envelope a bit further, leaving it a fun enough one-off engagement, but far from the instant classic status that joins the ranks of other comfort food installments within the genre that did it first and better.

My Grade: 6.2 or C-