Hey, look! It’s another killer clown movie. Gee, that’s new.
Clown in a Cornfield joins the likes of It and Terrifier in the killer clown sub-genre, and that means a whole lot of teenagers are going to meet their ends at the hands of somebody wearing one of those red fake noses on top of a mess of white face makeup. Will you care?
I don’t know, maybe? If you haven’t seen It or Terrifier (or watched a John Wayne Gacy documentary), well, then this has a shot at being your favorite killer clown movie. That is, until you see It or Terrifier and their sequels; this will then surely get dethroned.
I was actually expecting something a little more fun here, being that the film is directed by Eli Craig, maker of Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, a favorite film of mine. That movie spoofed horror films while actually being an effective horror film. This one feels like a movie processed out of other movies. It’s like mediocre horror Velveeta.
Quinn (Katie Douglas) and her doctor dad (Aaron Abrams) move to a small town after losing a loved one. The town has a legendary clown mascot named Frendo, and the local kids like to do TikTok/YouTube movies in which a fake Frendo is slaying people. Quinn hangs out with the wannabe film crew, and everything is all good fun—until a real killer clown starts taking them out.
There’s a mystery at play that is easily guessable. Some of the “kills” are creative, but if you’ve seen the last couple of Terrifier films featuring Art the Clown, the whole enterprise will feel a bit derivative. The mayhem in a cornfield actually owes a lot to Freddy vs. Jason; it almost feels like the cornfield scenes were lifted from that film and put into this one. Uh oh, the stalks are moving! Must be a slasher killer in there!
The film is not all bad. Douglas is pretty good in the main role, and Abrams gets some decent scenes as the overly sensitive dad. It’s also good to see Will Sasso as the suspicious Sheriff Dunne.
In a year that is going to give us a lot of horror films, I suspect Cornfield will wind up somewhere near the top of the bottom half. It’s not anything you need to rush out to see, like Sinners or the sadly underappreciated Companion. It’s just another killer clown movie.
A little bit of Craig’s Tucker and Dale-style dark humor sneaks into the proceedings, but not enough. The final result is surprisingly flat, and I’ve now seen too many “scary” clowns at the movies. Scary clowns no longer scare me.
OK, I’m lying. They still scare me … just not the one in this movie.