Killer B's on DVD: Dead Clowns

I've never found clowns particularly amusing. Annoying? Sure. Creepy? Definitely. There's something about the painted-on grins, baggy pants and gigantic shoes that lend themselves more to horror than hilarity. Scary clowns worked pretty well in Killer Klowns From Outer Space and the TV adaptation of Stephen King's It, though the slasher flick Fear of Clowns has quickly become one of my least favorite movies of all time. Dead Clowns, just out from Lionsgate, is the first flick that I know of to use zombie clowns, so I went into this one with a modest sense of optimism.

The town of Port Emmet is being pummeled by a hurricane. The last time a storm of this intensity came through was in 1954 and that storm, aided by a bridge support weakened by a drunken tugboat captain, sent a circus train plummeting into the bay. Parts of the train were eventually brought up, but the clown car has remained buried at the bottom of the ocean ever since. Now stirred up by the storm and angered at the neglect that their mortal remains have suffered, the clowns emerge from the bottom of the bay to feast on the flesh of the residents of Port Emmet. The only warning their victims get is the distant sound of calliope music.

Now that's a pretty cool premise. The problem here is that barely any of the characters do anything beyond showing up, learning about the zombie clowns and dying horribly. The presence of B-movie scream queens Debbie Rochon (who starred in Skin Crawl, which I reviewed in a previous installment of Killer B's on DVD) and Brinke Stevens (from The Slumber Party Massacre and Scream Queen Hot Tub Party), as well as a new angle for the done-to-death zombie genre, had me hoping for more than Dead Clowns was willing to deliver. The presence of an actual protagonist would certainly have helped. Instead we have a handful of characters whose paths never cross, dealing with the zombie clowns on their own.

Characterization is a secondary concern at best, with some characters never even being given names (Rochon is billed as "Tormented Woman"). I had expected either Rochon or Stevens' character Lillian to emerge as the hero, but Lillian is dispatched early on, and while Rochon lives longer, she is given zilch for character development. The lapses in logic are downright maddening. Why would a train full of clowns be traveling in costume? When they return to life, why are their faces a rotten mess but their costumes still bright and shiny? The acting is pretty dreadful, though in some cases, like when Stevens is saddled with some long-winded and unnatural sounding exposition, the problem lies more with the writer than the performer.

Director Steve Sessions is obviously a fan of the Lucio Fulci style of zombie, with his walking dead shuffling about like sleepwalkers, moving even more slowly than the classic Romero-style flesh-eaters. There's even a scene in Dead Clowns that is obviously inspired by the famous splinter-to-the-eye gag from Fulci's Zombie, although a meat thermometer is substituted here. The film's basic premise seems to be inspired by John Carpenter's The Fog, but there's also a dash of Fulci's City of the Living Dead (a.k.a. The Gates of Hell). Obviously Sessions has a love for zombie films and I would have loved to hear about his influences in an audio commentary, but the disk's only extras are trailers for more direct-to-DVD horror titles. I suggest that even the most ardent horror fans shuffle on past this one.