Starring Grant Cramer, Suzanne Snyder, John Allen Nelson, John Vernon, Michael Siegel, Peter Licassi, Royal Dano, Christopher Titus, Irene Michaels, Karla Sue Krull
Directed by Stephen Chiodo
Expectations: High, been looking forward to this one for a while.
When I was a kid my buddy used to bring his Fangoria magazines to school and we’d check out all the cool ghoulies, goblins and killer gore FX horror films of the 80s and 90s had to offer. It was a golden time for me in which the seed was deeply sown for my love of the genre and the FX that came with it. In those days it was all about foam latex masks and appliances, scale models and slick opticals of raygun blasts and lightning. Camera tricks fooled the mind in clever ways that less-than-subtle, modern CG does not. Many of the films I was exposed to in these Fangoria issues are long-standing favorites, while others I still have yet to see. My childhood household had an unspoken hex on true horror pictures, so I had to wait to see a lot of this stuff until I was old enough to get ahold of them myself. Killer Klowns from Outer Space is one of these films, until now only glimpsed in the colorful pages of Fangoria and in short clips.
Many movies that have built up this much hype just can’t live up to it. Killer Klowns from Outer Space also has the PG-13 horror movie stigma working against it. In spite of all the odds stacked against it, Killer Klowns from Outer Space managed to worm its way into my heart and I thoroughly enjoyed it. A big part of my enjoyment were the excellent range of visual FX on display throughout the picture, and when a bunch of brothers that run an FX studio make a movie this is only to be expected. From the hyper-detailed foam latex clown masks to the wonderful optical raygun FX, from the stop-motion shadow puppets to the cotton candy bodypods, Killer Klowns from Outer Space astounds and entertains at every turn.