Verdict
Summary
Clown in a Cornfield mostly had me at hello for awhile until it tried tinkering around with typical slasher conventions and tried to be a little too clever and woke for its own good. Slasher horror films have been around for decades and aren’t difficult to get right, but it’s shocking how many recent slasher films have completely fumbled the ball with bad scripting, incorrect casting, and a lack of the fundamentals of what makes the genre so great.
Plot:
A teen girl and her father move to a small mid-western town where a killer clown stalks and kills teenagers.
Review:
Teen Quinn (Katie Douglas) and her father, a doctor named Glenn (Aaron Abrams), relocate to a small all-American town called Kettle Springs where the corn syrup factory that used to be the wellspring of the town has since dried up. The town mascot is a grinning clown known as Baypen, and every year the town celebrates Baypen with a parade and fanfare. Quinn makes some new friends in high school, and her friends have well-connected families with legacy that goes back generations, and her new friends are a bunch of screwballs who fool around making prank videos around the abandoned syrup factory. But when Quinn and her new posse are goofing around one night, they seem to become prey for Baypen, but a much more sinister version of him, as he begins to stalk the kids one by one over the course of a horrific night.
Adapted from a novel and directed by Eli Craig, whose previous comedic slasher Tucker and Dale vs Evil flipped the script on slashers (successfully), Clown in a Cornfield mostly had me at hello for awhile until it tried tinkering around with typical slasher conventions and tried to be a little too clever and woke for its own good. Slasher horror films have been around for decades and aren’t difficult to get right, but it’s shocking how many recent slasher films have completely fumbled the ball with bad scripting, incorrect casting, and a lack of the fundamentals of what makes the genre so great, and like It’s a Wonderful Knife, Thanksgiving, She Came From the Woods, Founders Day, Hell of a Summer, Heart Eyes, Deer Camp ’86, and all the Netflix / Amazon streaming films such as the Fear Street films and Totally Killer (just to name a handful), Clown in a Cornfield is ultimately a disappointment for me and gets the formula wrong. It’s too bad because this one got pretty close and then just throws it all away in a wildly messy climax.
RLJE / Shudder has just released a two-disc collectible steel book edition of Clown in a Cornfield that includes the 4K Ultra HD and the Blu-ray disc. No complaints on picture or sound quality because they’re top notch, and there’s an audio commentary with the director, the author of the book, and some cast members.
