Actually, what this crazed clown movie needs is fewer half-baked ideas

The Age

07-05-2025

CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD ★★½
(MA15+) 96 minutes
When you buy a ticket to a horror movie called Clown in a Cornfield, you might reasonably assume you know what you're getting. The director Eli Craig delivers on these expectations in the opening scene, where the clown dispatches a couple of hapless youngsters who have sneaked into the cornfield to have sex.
From there, things get more complicated. The clown, named Frendo, has the standard creepy-clown look (red nose, miniature pork-pie hat, chainsaw). Still, when he isn't thinning the ranks of the new generation, he's presentable enough to serve as the mascot for Baypen Corn Syrup, formerly the major industry of the rust-belt town of Kettle Springs, where the young heroine Quinn (Katie Douglas) unwillingly moves in with her widower dad (Aaron Abrams) who's desperate to start anew.
Following a fire at the Baypen factory, the syrup is now made elsewhere, perhaps in China. But Frendo remains the town mascot, his beneficent influence celebrated every year with a parade on Founder's Day, with local dignitaries keen to ensure the clown isn't disrespected.
Nothing suss there, clearly. Still, the cult is resisted by some, notably a handful of local teenagers rumoured to have burned down the factory in a prank gone wrong, a group that includes Cole (Carson MacCormac), the charming but troubled heir to the Baypen fortune, whose younger sister died around the same time as Quinn's mother.
To the dismay of her dad, Quinn is quickly befriended by these troublemakers, who collectively resemble Mystery Inc from Scooby-Doo, and who initiate her into their practice of staging hidden-camera stunts involving an evil version of Frendo, which have gained them a considerable following on YouTube. In classic boy-who-cried-wolf fashion, this means no one will believe them when another evil version of Frendo goes on the attack, echoing a chain of murders from decades earlier.
Got all that? Good, because now you're ready for the big twist halfway through. All of this may have worked better in Adam Cesare's original 350-page novel, but at a little over 90 minutes the movie is all set-up and no payoff, too lacking in internal logic to deliver much in the way of laughs or scares.
There's nothing wrong with using a teen horror movie to comment on the generation gap, class relations and the decline of the US manufacturing sector. But it helps if the plot isn't so cluttered with half-realised ideas that the climax winds up being cluttered further with long speeches explaining what the message was meant to be.