‘Clown in a Cornfield' Review: Stalkers
'Clown in a Cornfield,' a new teen slasher film from the writer-director Eli Craig, is both silly and as sincere as an honor student's term paper. To its credit, it uses horror to examine the economic woes of the deteriorating Midwest and the emotional shortcomings of the working-class Gen X-ers and baby boomers who never left there.
What it could have used is the kind of whip smart satire that made Craig's superior film 'Tucker and Dale vs. Evil' (2011) a horror-comedy paragon.
The film is set in a small Missouri farming community that was once home to, and defined by, a thriving corn syrup operation with a clown mascot known as Frendo. New in town are Quinn (Katie Douglas, terrific) and her doctor father (Aaron Abrams), who quickly discover how damaged the town became after a mysterious fire crippled the company.
Just as Quinn starts to make friends, along come some psychopaths who dress like Frendo and kill select young folk to prevent them from leaving town and achieving their dreams. Or something like that. It's hard to discern: In adapting Adam Cesare's novel, Carter Blanchard and Craig have crafted a screenplay that focuses more on grisly (and often gnarly) slaughters than on providing answers to the killer cabal's motivations. A gay romance provides a sweet if underdeveloped detour.
A lackluster horror movie gets points if the leading villain is a real bugaboo. But the Frendos, alas, look like poser versions of Pennywise, Art the Clown and other, scarier horror bozos.
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Forbes
a day ago
- Forbes
Horror Comedy ‘Clown In A Cornfield' Arrives On Streaming This Week
Frendo the Clown in a scene from "Clown in a Cornfield." Clown in a Cornfield — a horror comedy from the director of Tucker & Dale vs. Evil — is coming to digital streaming this week. Directed by Eli Craig, Clown in a Cornfield opened in theaters on May 9. The summary for the movie reads, 'In Clown in a Cornfield, Quinn (Katie Douglas) and her father (Aaron Abrams) have just moved to the quiet town of Kettle Springs, hoping for a fresh start. Instead, she discovers a fractured community that has fallen on hard times after the treasured Baypen Corn Syrup Factory burned down. 'As the locals bicker amongst themselves and tensions boil over, a sinister, grinning figure emerges from the cornfields to cleanse the town of its burdens, one bloody victim at a time. Welcome to Kettle Springs. The real fun starts when Frendo the Clown comes out to play.' Clown in a Cornfield is based on Adam Cesare's book of the same name. The movie also stars Kevin Durand, Carson MacCormack, Cassandra Potenza, Verity Marks, Ayo Solanke, Vincent Muller and Will Sasso. As confirmed by a listing on Prime Video, Clown in a Cornfield arrived on digital streaming via premium video on demand on Tuesday, June 11. In addition to Prime Video, Clown in a Cornfield will be available for purchase for PVOD for $24.99 on such digital platforms as Apple TV, Fandango at Home and YouTube. Since PVOD rentals are typically $5 less than purchase prices, viewers can expect to rent Clown in a Cornfield for 48 hours for $19.99. Naturally, with the word 'clown' in the title of Clown in a Cornfield, Eli Craig knew that it would make fans think of the murderous Art the Clown from director Damien Leone's Terrifier horror hits. As such, Craig made a conscious decision to avoid the unrated horror and gore route of Leone's movies by trusting his own instincts by creating a line that he — and Frendo the Clown — should not cross. 'My gut is the line and sometimes I go to the point where I feel like I'm testing my own gut, where I can't really watch something myself,' Craig said in a Zoom conversation prior to the release of Clown in a Cornfield. "With Terrifier 3, I had to watch the film in little segments to study it and I realized, 'Oh wow, Damien Leone is a master.' I wanted to look at how he was doing in-camera special effects. [At the same time] I had to disassociate what I was seeing to process it. I had to think about the process of how he did stuff so I wouldn't puke.' However, Craig, added, he made sure to take full advantage of what an R rating allowed. 'I feel like I've hit the mark where most people are going to go, 'Ooh!' and start turning away, but then I'm done,' Craig explained. 'I have these moments that may be a little shocking, but there's just a touch of humor in it as well that makes it tolerable. 'I want to have the kills be quite real and a little bit shocking, gritty and brutal, but also have a touch of playfulness to them,' Craig added. 'They're not brutal to the point of being sickening, though. That's the line for me. I'm not interested in making a sickening movie. I want to make a fun movie that has kills in it.' Clown in a Cornfield has earned $7.2 million in domestic ticket sales and more than $532,000 internationally for a worldwide box office gross of $7.7 million to date. Craig said the production budget for the film was 'significantly less' than $10 million. The film also earned a 74% 'fresh' rating from Rotten Tomatoes critics based on 136 reviews, while audiences gave it a 59% 'rotten' score on RT's Popcornmeter based on 500-plus verified user ratings. Clown in a Cornfield arrives on PVOD on Tuesday.
Tom's Guide
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This crime thriller starring Daniel Craig and Tom Hardy just arrived on Paramount Plus — and it's a must-watch
Looking through all the new shows and movies on Paramount Plus this month, a name jumped out at me: "Layer Cake." Now, that title might not be familiar to you. The 2004 crime thriller made a whopping $11.8 million at the box office. But it features a lot of names you're probably familiar with. It stars Daniel Craig, pre-James Bond, as a cocaine dealer who hates violence and just wants out of the game. One of his associates? A young Tom Hardy. There's also Michael Gambon, who you probably know best as Albus Dumbledore from the third through eighth "Harry Potter" films, but in this movie is a ruthless crime lord. And it's all directed by Matthew Vaughn, doing his best Guy Ritchie impression before he'd go on to make "Kick-Ass" and "Kingsman: The Secret Service." So if you're looking for something to watch after the epic "MobLand" finale or just need a great movie to watch this weekend, here's why you need to check out "Layer Cake on Paramount Plus. As I already mentioned, "Layer Cake" stars Daniel Craig as XXXX, a successful cocaine dealer who wants out of the coke business and to retire to a quite life. There's just one problem: his boss. XXXX works for Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham), who needs some things done before our lead can enjoy some peace and quiet. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. First, Jimmy needs our otherwise unnamed protagonist to find Charlie (Nathalie Lunghi), a drug-addicted runaway with a connected father. He also needs a drug deal completed with the Duke (Jamie Foreman), who is offering up $1 million in ecstasy tablets to Jimmy. Of course, none of this goes to plan, and now XXXX is having to navigate the layers of London's criminal underworld to get the job done and get out. Daniel Craig has many iconic performances under his belt at this point. The handsome and deadly James Bond, the brilliant detective Benoit Blanc and a dancing diva in Taika Waititi's Belvedere vodka advertisement, just to name a few. But his performance in "Layer Cake" might be my favorite of them all. It's a perfect blend of wit and being cool under pressure. In many ways, it's similar to the performance he'd later give in 2006 in "Casino Royale." His performance in "Layer Cake" is sometimes even cited as why he was cast as James Bond in 2005, though others say EON Productions had their eyes on Craig as early as 1996. Still, the performance in "Layer Cake" is slightly more grounded than the one Craig gives in his first Bond movie, and not quite as bleak as the one he gives in "Quantum of Solace." It lacks the cockiness of Bond, while still making sure the audience knows Craig is the smartest man in the room. Yes, others in this movie are well worth watching — Gambon is particularly excellent, and Hardy, Sienna Miller, Colm Meany and George Harris are plenty good — but it's still Craig who steals the movie from the beginning and never lets go. "Layer Cake" is also, simply put, a great crime thriller. If you like Guy Ritchie movies or Matthew Vaughn's other work, then you'll easily find yourself enjoying it. And it has a killer soundtrack that's almost worth the price of admission on its own. There's no reason not to check it out now that it's available to stream on Paramount Plus. Stream "Layer Cake" now on Paramount Plus Malcolm has been with Tom's Guide since 2022, and has been covering the latest in streaming shows and movies since 2023. He's not one to shy away from a hot take, including that "John Wick" is one of the four greatest films ever made. Here's what he's been watching lately:
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'I Don't Understand You': Nick Kroll, Andrew Rannells movie inspired by adoption fraud story from filmmakers
While Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells voice some pretty hysterical characters in Big Mouth, they're now sharing the screen in the horror-comedy I Don't Understand You (now in theatres). Written and directed by married filmmakers David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano, the movie had a particularly interesting starting point. In I Don't Understand You Kroll and Rannells play a couple, Dom and Cole, who have just fallen victim to adoption fraud, but things are looking up. A pregnant woman named Candace (Amanda Seyfried) thinks they're the right fit for the family to adopt her child. But just before that happens, Dom and Cole take a romantic Italian vacation. Things take a turn when they get lost outside of Rome, trying to find a restaurant. As their stranded in an unknown location, the trip turns to bloody Italian chaos. As Craig and Crano identified, the first portion of the movie, up until the couple gets stuck going to the restaurant, is quite close to the real experience the filmmakers had. "We were adopting a child. We had been through an adoption scam, which was heartbreaking, and then had a completely different experience when we matched with the birth mother of our son," Crano told Yahoo. "But we found out that we were going to have him literally like two days before we were going on our 10th anniversary trip." "And we were like, 'Shit, should we not go?' But we decided to do it, and you're so emotionally opened up and vulnerable in that moment that it felt like a very similar experience to being in a horror movie, even though it's a joyful kind of situation." A key element of I Don't Understand You is that feeling of shock once the story turns from a romance-comedy to something much bloodier. 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"And it was just a very trusting process, because neither of us are fluent enough to have that kind of dialectical specificity that you would in English." "It was super cool to just be watching an actor perform a scene that you've written in English that has been translated a couple of times, but you still completely understand it, just by the generosity of their performance." For Craig, he has an extensive resume of acting roles, including projects like Boy Erased and episodes of Dropout. Among the esteemed alumni of the Upright Citizens Brigade, he had a writing "itch" for a long time, and was "in awe" of Crano's work as a director. "Truthfully, in a weird way, it felt like such a far off, distant job, because everything felt really difficult, and I think with this project it just made me understand that it was just something I truly love and truly wanted to do," Craig said. "I love the idea of creative control and being in a really collaborative situation. Acting allows you to do that momentarily, but I think like every other job that you can do on a film is much longer lasting, and I think that's something I was truly seeking." For Crano, he also grew up as a theatre kid, moving on to writing plays in college. "The first time I got laughs for jokes I was like, 'Oh, this is it. Let's figure out how to do this,'" he said. "I was playwriting in London, my mom got sick in the States, so I came back, and I started writing a movie, because I was living in [Los Angeles] and I thought, well there are no playwrights in L.A., I better write a movie.'" That's when Crano found a mentor in Peter Friedlander, who's currently the head of scripted series, U.S. and Canada, at Netflix. "I had written this feature and ... we met with a bunch of directors, great directors, directors I truly admire, and they would be like, 'It should be like this.' And I'd be like, 'Yeah, that's fine, but maybe it's more like this.' And after about five of those Peter was like, 'You're going to direct it. We'll make some shorts. We'll see if you can do it.' He just sort of saw it," Crano recalled. "It's nice to be seen in any capacity for your ability, but [I started to realize] this is not so different from writing, it's just sort of writing and physical space and storytelling, and I love to do it. ... It is a very difficult job, because it requires so much money to test the theory, to even see if you can." But being able to work together on I Don't Understand You, the couple were able to learn things about and from each other through the filmmaking process. "David is lovely to everyone," Crano said. "He is much nicer than I am at a sort of base level, and makes everyone feel that they can perform at the best of their ability. And that's a really good lesson." "Brian literally doesn't take anything personally," Craig added. "Almost to a fault." "And it's very helpful in an environment where you're getting a lot of no's, to have a partner who's literally like, 'Oh, it's just no for now. Great, let's move on. Let's find somebody who's going to say yes, maybe we'll come back to that no later.' I'm the pessimist who's sitting in the corner going, 'Somebody just rejected me, I don't know what to do.' ... It just makes you move, and that's that's very helpful for me."
