FrightFest review – Super Happy Fun Clown
Director Patrick Rea has made a couple of excellent female-focused monster movies – I Am Lisa and They Wait in the Dark. This is a looser picture, expanded from a short, built around a committed performance from Jennifer Seward as Jenn-O the Clown – a mime alter ego taken on by downtrodden Jennifer Sullivan as she goes on a Halloween kill-rampage like a circus-themed incarnation of Ms .45 who has been triggered not by sexual assault but by the relentless belittling of a nagging mother (Deborah Madick) and a disbarred lawyer husband (Dan Daly).
After offing these tormentors in her alter ego, Jennifer kills more or less at random on the principle that if she can’t become famous as a children’s entertainer she’ll be notorious as a clown-faced spree killer. She even kills people she likes – a sympathetic workmate (Tim Shelburne) – and chooses a Haunted Cinema attraction as the venue for the climactic massacre … which Rea takes as an excuse to stage a series of kills in stagey sets as the clown murders her way through the famous monsters canon … impaling an Orlok, electrocuting a Frankenstein Monster, burning a mummy, etc. In a rather throwaway punchline, the final boss in this game is another crazy female clown (Haley Solowy) but this doesn’t prompt a realisation.
I like Rea’s work, but was less taken with this than his earlier films … Seward is game and puts in the effort, but Jenn-O is impossible to like or care about, a doormat in her civilian life (and putupon in a childhood prologue which establishes the promise she squanders) and neither cute, funny or scary in any manifestation of her SHFC persona. Everyone else in the film is fed up with clowns, and that’s understandable. There is a decent strand with a couple of cops (Nicole Hall, Matt Leisy) hoping for a quiet holiday season with nothing more troubling than paraffin-filled burning pumpkins but overwhelmed by the climbing body count.
Here’s the FrightFest listing.
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