'Clown in a Cornfield' Review: Irrelevant Reverence is the Saddest Form of Flattery
‘Clown in a Cornfield’ opens on a strong, properly familiar note. Shaky-cam in a cornfield sets the scene for a bevy of drunk, high, and other such substance-influenced versions of immature college students partying around a bonfire. Two sneak off and go just a little too far out and, well… you get the awful malicious picture. Unfortunately, it never hits the heights of its opening sequence again. This summates the film’s overarching issue quite well, in that everything that it does well has been done well elsewhere. The first scare up to the title card is great, sure, but it isn’t original to this movie.
Clear inspirations in the form of Halloween and Scream, for example, float above this movie like an unrelenting haze, shadowing the entire thing in a presence awfully distracting. Clown in a Cornfield , thematically, is about as subtle as a truck through the side of a grocery store; it bears no sign of the pulsing sort of narrative structure that originated in Craven’s masterpiece, nor so much as a semblance of the iconic aesthetic bones that drove Halloween. What this (painfully) modern slasher does try and borrow from older movies feels like a parody on films that have already attempted to do so. It’s a tribute to tributes, about 20 years too early and far too rough around the edges to even earn a little credit for trying. Truly, this is a misfire for a multitude of reasons.
The film follows a group of sometimes-sober college students, led by the indomitable Quinn (Katie Douglas), in a small town with a seriously sinister secret. It’s all about the clowns — from the physical threat themselves to the misguides people that abuse the innocents below them. This is a story about power, pain, and suppression; valiant themes, for sure, although when buried in a field of cosmetic muck, they become hard to tether to in any meaningful way.
Douglas is the far-and-away highlight. The entire cast is solid all the way around, but she carries the same “scream queen” spirit that glowed at the core of the aforementioned slasher horror classics. If this movie did anything right in repetition and reverence, it was simply adding her to it. She’s brilliant, and may be on her way to a real, memorable career in the space.
And, admittedly, the clowns are creepy. When aren’t they? Especially when equipped with crossbows, chainsaws, and big, unsettling, goofy shoes. Credit where credit is due, there are a few extended sequences where the camera moves around a little and the jumps and shouts have a chance to flesh out. A sequence in the hallway (no spoilers) specifically comes to mind as one that is memorably slow, terribly creepy and, ultimately, satisfying and well-executed. A kernel of gold in a sea of exhausted yellow.
The finale is appropriately the worst part, as the modern slasher genre, in its great efforts to replicate older, much better movies, almost always run out of narrative steam by the end. They end up copying one another in weird, ironic fashion, ending up in spaces without any sort of structure or stakes, eventually resolved by the random appearance of a character who’d been mysteriously missing for the previous half-hour. It’s almost like the more recent Marvel entries. Clown in a Cornfield falls squarely in this unfortunate category.
While the film’s early strengths and occasional heights shouldn’t be outright dismissed, it’s difficult to hang onto the positives when they’re mostly loaded on the front. As the film trudges along, slowly but surely losing the viewer’s trust along the way, you slowly stop thinking about what you liked in the first few minutes. All that’s left by the third act is a mirage of both what was hinted to and what could’ve been.
A mirage that represents much better movies that you’ve already seen. Much better movies that, in the future, you’ll watch 100 times before this one. Clown in a Cornfield is a respectable, even understandable effort, but it does nothing at all to warrant anything beyond a smile and a wave.
Still, keep the clowns away. They’re always going to be scary - whether they haunt or nightmares or they’re simply a poor suggestion on your playlist.