A generic teens-in-peril slasher, ‘Clown in a Cornfield' can't cut the crop
Is there anything as dependable as the slasher formula? It waxes, wanes and winks its way through cultural cycles but it endures; malleable yet sturdy, high or lowbrow (usually low), requiring just a few key elements: some teenagers and a masked killer. A small town would be nice. Change up the costumes and the weapons and it practically writes itself. Enter 'Clown in a Cornfield' from 'Tucker & Dale vs. Evil' filmmaker Eli Craig.
This slasher does exactly what it says on the tin: A murderous clown emerges from the cornfields of Kettle Springs, Mo. and mauls misbehaving teens to shreds. In an opening prologue set in 1991, Craig signals the silliness with which we should enjoy the film: A future victim marvels at the size of a footprint in the damp soil and the clown's shoes give him away with a squeak as he impales our unfortunate soul.
What sets this particular movie apart is its provenance, adapted from a 2020 horror novel by Adam Cesare. That literary origin does give this otherwise light, disposable genre romp a bit more heft, though the backstory and generational history that's alluded to isn't entirely explored onscreen. Craig and Carter Blanchard collaborated on the screenplay adaptation, and the film relies on the kind of quickie reveals and twists that audiences would expect from this kind of thing.
Craig is self-reflective while being appropriately reverent to the tropes of the genre. The closest recent comparison would be Eli Roth's 'Thanksgiving,' another outrageously costumed killer movie, and while Craig doesn't have Roth's gleefully sadistic creativity when it comes to kills, his teens are a bit more fun to be around, especially the snarky Quinn (Katie Douglas), who moves to Kettle Springs with her doctor dad (Aaron Abrams) and immediately falls in with a group of popular YouTube-obsessed classmates who make horror films on their phones about their town mascot, Frendo, of the corn syrup factory.
Quinn starts crushing on Cole (Carson MacCormac), the scion of the town's founders. Every year, they celebrate tradition with the Founder's Day parade, foregrounding Frendo's iconic visage. But it seems as soon as Quinn shows up, things start to go wrong. Teens start turning up dead, evil clowns start revving their chainsaws. It's initially challenging to tell what's real and what's an elaborate prank.
There's a theme that drifts through 'Clown in a Cornfield' about teens and their phones and how we live our lives through screens and ever-present cameras, but Craig never fully threads that needle. At a time when it's increasingly difficult to discern what's real and what's not, especially on our phones, that more sophisticated story never gets told, in favor of more throwback-style bloodbaths and showboating bad-guy speeches.
'Clown in a Cornfield' is fun, to be sure, but feels about as substantial as a corn puff. Douglas is beguiling enough with her humorous, spunky performance, and MacCormac capably keeps up with her. Will Sasso and Kevin Durand are welcome supporting players as a few of the oddly aggressive town elders. While things get a little too 'Scooby-Doo' at times, Craig smartly keeps it moving: This is a light and breezy affair with a few unexpected twists, some social commentary that doesn't entirely land and not enough staying power to be truly memorable. Ah, well: Cesare already has two sequel novels published, so there's already plenty more Frendo the Clown ready to be harvested.
Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
36 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
How a filmmaker couple's adoption story inspired the bloody dark comedy ‘I Don't Understand You'
A bloody horror-comedy isn't the genre that springs to mind as a 'love letter' to one's 5-year-old, but for Brian Crano and David Joseph Craig, it's the perfect way to express their devotion to their child. The married filmmakers started penning the semi-autobiographical screenplay as a therapeutic exercise during the COVID-19 pandemic shortly after adopting their son. 'With the tiredness of having a newborn, it was kind of our mutual catharsis during that time,' Craig said. But a deeply serious, emotional script about their difficult road to fatherhood didn't interest them. Instead, the final product begins as a lighthearted comedy then turns dark — complete with a few dead bodies. 'I Don't Understand You,' which hit theaters Friday, stars Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells as characters loosely based on Crano and Craig, who also co-directed the movie. The beginning of the story faithfully follows the real-life couple's journey to become fathers, including a heartbreaking experience with adoption fraud. They had been trying to adopt a child for nearly three years and felt weighed down by the challenges. In a twist of fate, they were matched with a birth mother just as they were traveling to Italy to celebrate their 10th anniversary. That trip was essentially a comedy of errors. Their car got stuck in a ditch during a relentless rainstorm and the couple was rescued by an old Italian woman and her family, whom they couldn't understand at all. When they told their friend — and the movie's eventual producer — actor and filmmaker Joel Edgerton about the travel nightmare, he encouraged them to get writing. But how did Crano and Craig go from crafting characters loosely based on themselves to making them (mostly accidental) murderers? By adapting their real-life coping mechanism to the film. 'We processed our own trauma around what happened to us personally through really dark comedy to each other,' Craig said. 'It just felt like that was the story we were prepared to tell.' 'Doing a polemical, flag-wavy, tear-jerky adoption movie felt like really the wrong vibe for us,' Crano added. As the couple described the process of making the film, they frequently finished each other's sentences. They were in sync despite being on a Zoom call from different coasts, with Craig in New York ahead of the film's premiere and Crano in L.A. Their overlapping responses seem to mirror their writing process — each is attuned to his partner's strengths and how his mind works, and they're both 'obsessed' with iteration, as Crano said, hoping to find the perfect turn of phrase or one-liner through repeated conversations. 'Not to interrupt, Brian,' Craig interjected at one point, 'but I think this is where you were going.' Kroll and Rannells' Dom and Cole, like Crano and Craig, learn the happy news of a match after adoption struggles, get their car stuck in a ditch on their anniversary trip and find refuge in an old Italian woman's home. Then the plot departs from reality and descends into macabre humor, with Cole accidentally pushing the old lady down the stairs, killing her. The duo didn't have much of the plot drawn out ahead of time. Crano said they just wanted to explore the question: 'What's the worst thing that they could do next?' For Kroll and Rannells, playing characters inspired by their directors enabled them to tap into the emotional heart of the story in an authentic way. Both actors, speaking to The Times via Zoom, said the directors were transparent about their adoption experience. 'It would be so funny if we had been like, 'Hey, what was it like when you found out that you weren't gonna get the baby?' and they were like, 'How dare you?'' Kroll quipped. 'But it was super helpful to have them as references and resources, but also at the same time, their willingness to let us make choices that may not have been exactly what they would have said or how they would have said it. David and Brian had a really clear vision for it, but also were quite open to things organically taking shape that was new to the film.' Rannells, who was working with a directing team for the first time, commended the duo's ability to run the ship collaboratively. 'They were very much always on the same page, which was great,' he said. 'That was maybe a little bit of a fear of going into it. I was like, 'How is this really going to work?' Like, 'Who are we listening to and how?' But they did it really seamlessly and it never felt overwhelming.' Much of the comedy Kroll and Rannells deliver is rooted in cultural misunderstandings. Dom's Duolingo streak proves insufficient in helping the couple communicate in Italy, and they often mistake the locals' remarks or actions as homophobic. Craig said the characters' frequent misinterpretations took on the role of the 'monster,' since this is a horror movie without a true boogeyman. Their ignorance leads them to believe they're in danger. 'Our monster is their own perception of hostility,' he said. 'There's such a deep desire to be comfortable that they would almost rather do violence than be uncomfortable,' Crano added. Craig chimed in, 'And have to talk about it with somebody they can't communicate with.' Although they have committed American tourist faux pas like their characters, Crano and Craig said the adoption story is the most true-to-life aspect of the movie. The couple's beloved dog Axel — who died just a few months after they wrapped shooting — is Dom and Cole's pet in the film and their young son, Washington, nicknamed 'Washy,' plays Dom and Cole's child in a brief scene. After seeing himself on the big screen at the film's debut at South by Southwest last year, Craig said the 5-year-old thinks he's a movie star. His one demand, they said, was to wear a cowboy costume for his scene, which they obliged. Crano and Craig said Washy will likely be allowed to watch 'I Don't Understand You' at a younger age than he should. 'The thing we really hope he gets out of it is the true message of the movie: 'What would you do for your child?'' Craig said. 'And we hope he really understands that we would do anything for him.' 'It is a love letter to him,' Crano said. 'In a purely strange way,' Craig added, finishing his husband's thoughts once more.
Los Angeles Times
37 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Jess Walter's sublime ‘So Far Gone' finds redemption in exasperated Pacific Northwest exile
Jess Walter's searing and sublime eighth novel, 'So Far Gone,' is a wistful elegy — some might say a eulogy — to a kinder, gentler time. Its compelling antihero, sixty-something Rhys Kinnick, has spent seven years in self-imposed exile, occupying a cinder block cabin in a remote region of Washington state. His attempts to improve the home his grandfather once envisioned as a thriving sheep farm have stalled, but he has managed to read more than 900 books during his stay, and to write 2,000-plus pages of a still-unfinished metaphysical volume ambitiously titled 'The Atlas of Wisdom.' He reassures himself that in becoming a hermit — leaving behind his daughter, Bethany, and grandchildren, Leah and Asher — and eschewing most creature comforts, he's modeling Thoreau's 'Walden.' In the rare encounters he has with other humans, he enjoys quoting favorite passages from it, such as: 'A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.' And he's let alone quite a few. His 'step aside' was in part sparked by a 2016 Thanksgiving altercation with his daughter's dangerously sanctimonious husband, Shane. He's a born-again Christian whose adherence to increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories have him believing that even the NFL has been infiltrated by 'globalists.' Rhys has been subjected to Shane's rants for years, and distills his son-in-law's worldview down to this: 'a Satanic liberal orthodoxy whose end goal was to subsume good Christians like Shane into an immoral, one-world socialist nightmare in which people pooped in the wrong bathroom.' Rhys tries valiantly not to engage with Shane during this holiday gathering, but for years he's hopelessly observed the 'long sad cultural decline' that led to 'the literal worst person in America' getting elected president, and he can't take it anymore. What's more, he's been laid off from his job as an environmental reporter for a newspaper, and his girlfriend has told him she doesn't ever want to see him again. When he mutters aloud what he is thinking about Shane — 'Daughter married an idiot' — all hell breaks loose, prompting Rhys to flee without explanation or apology. At first he has no idea where he's going, but, impulsively pitching his cell phone out the window, he steers his car toward the cabin, where he'll take permanent refuge. Among the many melancholy pleasures of this novel is that Walter synthesizes that desire many of us feel — and mostly resist — to crawl under the covers and not reemerge for a few decades, to nurse a 'bone-deep sorrow.' Rhys luxuriates in his solitude and lack of responsibility, detaching to such a degree that, in 2020, he's largely unaware of the COVID-19 pandemic until his barber insists he don a mask. He's startled out of his oblivion a few years later by a knock at the front door. On his porch stand a boy and a girl he at first mistakes for strangers. 'What are you fine capitalists selling?' he asks them. 'Magazines or chocolate bars?' 'We aren't selling anything,' replies the boy. 'We're your grandchildren.' It's then that Rhys comprehends that in protecting himself he has failed to be there for his beloved ex-wife, Celia, who's since died of lymphoma, or for his daughter, who has mysteriously run away, leaving a note to a neighbor instructing her to take her kids to stay with her estranged father. 'He is a recluse who cut off contact with our family and now lives in squalor,' she writes. Reading her words, remorse hits like a ton of bricks. He asks himself: What have I done? Having spent the last seven years in a state of self-absorption — or, as his ex-girlfriend Lucy later puts it: 'You've just been up there pouting?' — his new quest is simply to atone. Throughout the novel, Rhys references Kant, De Beauvoir, Sartre, Virginia Woolf and Epictetus, among others, using knowledge as a balm and escape hatch. He mourns the collapse of culture 'into a huge internet-size black hole of bad ideas, bald-faced lies, and bullshit.' But into that cauldron he must once again dive, as his daughter's whereabouts remain unknown, his 13-year-old granddaughter has been promised by her stepfather to the 19-year-old son of a radical church pastor, and his grandson is late for a chess match in Spokane. He starts up his 1978 Audi 100 — 'half car, half garbage. Carbage' — and the three take off. Rhys awkwardly rebuilds bridges with friends and family in a series of adventures and misadventures, and slowly registers what he's missed during his absence. 'Those changes had a strange quality to them,' he observes. 'Not only did they seem broadly unimpressive, but in some cases, they seemed like steps backwards.' For example, 'not only were there no flying cars, there seemed to be more big pickups and SUVs than ever.' Walter is a slyly adept social critic, and has clearly invested his protagonist with all of the outrage and heartbreak he himself feels about the dark course our world has taken. He's also invested his protagonist with a self-deprecating sense of humor that keeps his pessimism from veering into maudlin territory. If there's hope to be found within this harsh landscape, it's in our connection with one another — an antidote to despair. We all have to live through a dark season now and then, Rhys comforts himself. Or, to paraphrase a Virginia Woolf line from 'To the Lighthouse' that Rhys invoked earlier: What gets us through are 'little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.' Or for that matter, novels like this one. Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah's Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.
Boston Globe
14 hours ago
- Boston Globe
‘Dangerous Animals': DoorDash for sharks
However, I must mention that Stuart Gordon's grisly splatter masterpiece, 'Re-Animator' also played at Cannes 40 years ago. But that film didn't run in the esteemed 'Directors' Fortnight' section like this one. Considering that the violent, gory genre mashup ' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Jai Courtney as Tucker in 'Dangerous Animals.' (AMC) Mark Taylor/AMC Advertisement Byrne takes his time with screenwriter Nick Lepard's story. We don't discover Tucker's sadistic execution method of choice until around the 40-minute mark. To keep us on edge, there's a cheeky pre-credits sequence that establishes Tucker's murderous credentials. That opening scene introduces us to Heather (Ella Newton), a naïve tourist talked into going on Tucker's 'Swimming With Sharks' tour by the hunky guy accompanying her. When Tucker asks if they're a couple, Heather's hesitant reaction reveals that the guy is what the folks Down Under refer to as 'her bonk.' Advertisement There's something off about Tucker. He seems amiable, but he asks questions that imply that Heather and her hook-up might be in danger. During the pre-boat conversation, he establishes that no one will miss these two people if they suddenly disappear. There's just enough menace mixed in to make observant people uneasy. He even makes the children's song 'Baby Shark' more terrifying than it already is. Unfortunately for Heather, she can't hear the audience screaming 'Don't get on that boat, you fool!' After the duo visit the sharks in the typical shark-diving cave, Tucker stabs the guy to death and takes Heather hostage out on the open seas. Hassie Harrison as Zephyr and Josh Heuston as Moses in 'Dangerous Animals.' AMC Next, we meet our hero/Final Girl, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison). She's a blonde surfer girl loner who fled to Australia for the tasty waves and the solitude. Her introduction is timed with a hilarious needle drop I won't reveal. And her Meet Cute with real estate agent Moses (Josh Heuston) hinges on blackmail: Either she'll allow Moses to use her jumper cables to restart his car, or he'll tell the 7-Eleven clerk she shoplifted. 'Trust me, I'm not a serial killer,' he tells her. Since the movie only has room for one madman, Zephyr believes him. Then she jumps his bones in her massive van. After ghosting him the next morning as he's making her breakfast, Zephyr runs afoul of Tucker. He knocks her out, and she wakes up handcuffed on his boat next to Heather. Since she rocked his world so splendidly the night before, Moses becomes obsessed with finding out where Zephyr disappeared to in the morning. Like Heather, he's about to do something dumb simply because the sex was good. Advertisement Once Zephyr is captured, 'Dangerous Animals' becomes a cat and mouse game between her and Tucker. Since they're both loners, he sees a connection. 'You're a fighter,' he tells her, which makes his sadistic game more fun. Hassie Harrison as Zephyr and Jai Courtney as Tucker in 'Dangerous Animals.' AMC The film was shot on a real boat, so the location's interiors are claustrophobic but visually dull. But cinematographer Shelley Farthing-Dawe does wonders when we're not stuck inside. There are gorgeous images of the beach and the ocean. Tucker's boat is framed like an ugly orange aberration interrupting the blue majesty of sea and sky. The actors are often shot in close-up, which adds to the trapped feeling. At one point, Farthing-Dawe's lighting gives Tucker's hair a spiky halo as he's monologuing to one of his victims. The cinematography can't help the CGI sharks, though. They look faker than 'Jaws''s infamous star, Bruce the Shark. Kasra Rassoulzadegan's playful yet ominous editing is effective, even if the jump scares become redundant. And Michael Yezerski's rumbling score, while occasionally reminiscent of 'Dangerous Animals' falters by never gives Tucker a reason for his extreme, shark-based misogyny, nor does it make Zephyr an especially compelling Final Girl. Though Courtney and Harrison give their all, this is a slick-looking yet routine exercise that wastes an ideal premise. ★★1/2 DANGEROUS ANIMALS Directed by Sean Byrne. Written by Nick Lepard. Starring Jai Courtney, Hassie Harrison, Josh Heuston, Ella Newton. At AMC Boston Common, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport. 98 min. R (brutal shark violence, steamy human sex) Odie Henderson is the Boston Globe's film critic.
