The premise of Dead Clowns is based on a train wreck that happened 50 years ago. A circus train went off a bridge and plunged into the bay of Port Emmett. The clown car was never recovered. No efforts were made to rescue the clowns or recover their bodies and lay them to rest. Sometimes you can hear a calliope under the roar of the bay. No one in the town talks of it anymore. But, in the midst of a hurricane, the clowns have come back from the dead to have their revenge on the citizens of Port Emmett.

Dead Clowns is really bad. There’s almost no dialog, which is probably for the best, because what little dialog there is is delivered like a child reading aloud. You get scenes of people preparing for the hurricane and sitting around there homes. Then the story comes out of scream queen Brinke Stevens to her robotic male companion. Then you see scream queen Debbie Rochon sitting in her living room listening to music. She turns in off and cocks her ear, straining to hear something that turns out to be a calliope in the distance. For 90 seconds you are subjected to watching this lady listen intently to this calliope in the distance while she looks around with a look of worry. A minute and a half of this! This is a good example of how this movie plays out. Everything is so drawn out and slow. I think they were going for a sense of suspense but it ends up just dragging and dragging.

There’s also this outlaw couple who killed a priest for $58 driving through the hurricane. They’re chock full of poorly delivered, poorly written and poorly recorded dialog. I had to turn on the subtitles to be able to understand what they were talking about, which didn’t help a whole lot because it’s just mundane crap about how cool they are that they killed a priest. They video taped their crime and are on the lam. They decide to break into a house and end up taking it’s resident hostage. This is where you get the other half of the story about the clowns. Evidently, a high-tech search was done decades after the train wreck to search for the clown car. After so long, the clown car was so deep in the silt and mud that no one wanted to spare the coin it would take to get it out. More over, nobody wanted to spare the coin to erect a memorial for them in the town. This is why the clowns are so pissed. Soon after the hostage is done with her story, she’s killed by the zombie clowns along with the female of the outlaw duo. The male run off into the hurricane as soon as he sees the clown.

It also follows a security guard of some sort that snorts a drug that looks like sugar that makes him hallucinate. After wandering whatever business he’s paid to secure (it’s not all that evident what it is) he becomes trapped under, what looks to be, a section of wall made out of a few two-by-fours and a piece of drywall. It’s quite laughable, when you get a look at it, that he would be trapped under this thing that could obviously be lifted so easily. Nevertheless, being “trapped” under this bit stuff makes hims a prime target for the zombie clowns to come and hack off his arm, something that doesn’t even elicit so much as a yelp, let alone the blood curdling screams I would expect. No, he just grits his teeth and winces at the sight of it.

This movie is just full of stupid crap that takes forever happen and when it does, you can’t help but say “That’s all?”. The director was obviously trying deliver an air of suspense and dread to make you scream at the delivery, but most of the scenes are so drawn out that you can’t help but scream “Get a move on! I get it!” There’s 2 full minutes of zombie clowns eating a guys guts that look more like twisted up t-shirts with blood on them. That’s the thing, some of the special effects were top notch, but most of them were sophomoric.

The zombie clowns were really crappy looking. They seemed to be wearing masks made out of paper mache that kind of looked skull-ish with a mossy decay on them. Yet, after fifty years at the bottom of a bay, their clown clothes wear still bright and shiny.

Calling Dead Clowns a B-movie is putting it above it’s class. With the bad acting, bad dialog, bad camera work, bad camera, bad special effects, bad make-up, bad costumes, bad everything, it’s hard to think of this as anything more than a D-Movie, like something a kid made in his neighborhood for shits and giggles. Besides the handful of special effects that looked decent, the only other thing about this movie that was good was the use of stock footage of hurricanes. I didn’t even think of it as being stock footage for a good long time throughout the movie.

I don’t recommend that anybody bother watching this movie.

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