My Review of the Nifty Retro Slasher Clown in a Cornfield is Now Available for Everyone!

If you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you're going to like!

Quentin Tarantino and Richard Rodriguez's 2007 exploitation celebration Grindhouse was widely seen as a failure. When the much-hyped double feature didn’t immediately yield boffo box-office and the cover of Time, the Weinsteins pulled an I’ll Do Anything and removed what made the movies special and unique in a doomed attempt to get more return on their investment.

What Tarantino and Rodriguez conceived of as a nearly four-hour-long cinematic experience unlike any other, complete with two new movies in the 1970s mold and fake trailers from Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright, Eli Roth, and, in certain screenings in Canada, Jason Eisener, was turned into something much more conventional and less exciting and fun.

From a box-office perspective, the experiment did not work. Tarantino’s Death Proof underperformed commercially and is seen as one of his writer-director’s weakest films. Rodriguez’s Planet Terror didn’t fare any better with audiences or critics.

In the ensuing, something curious but not entirely unpredictable occurred. A high-profile commercial flop attracted a devoted cult following.

Even more impressively, its fake trailers became blueprints for actual motion pictures. First up was Rodriguez’s Machete, which failed to live up to the promise of Danny Trejo as a stoic badass and sex machine. Machete Kills wasn’t much better, but at least it introduced space travel and Mel Gibson in one of his first villainous roles.

Then came 2011’s Hobo With a Shotgun, a parody/pastiche of Reagan-era Cannon fare, most notably Death Wish 3, with a wonderfully deadpan, unhinged lead turn by a perfectly cast Rutger Hauer as the titular homeless avenger.

Hobo With a Shotgun was an adaptation of a trailer that was not part of Grindhouse originally, but fit its aesthetic so perfectly that it was added to some prints north of the border.

That still, somehow, wasn’t all. In 2023, sixteen years after Grindhouse underwhelmed commercially, Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, his fake trailer for a holiday-themed bloodbath, was turned into a critically and commercially successful feature film.

Tarantino and Rodriguez were not wrong in thinking there was a market for new B movies in the style of beloved schlock from the 1970s and 1980s. They just wildly overestimated our willingness to spend almost four hours in a movie theater watching deliberately tacky, campy detritus.

With House of the Devil, X, Pearl, and Maxxxine, Ti West has built a thriving career out of Grindhouse-style throwbacks that lovingly resurrect the look and feel of low-budget horror from the 1970s and 1980s.

Grindhouse was a flop, yet it proved influential, both in the movies it directly inspired and in movies in the Grindhouse vein, like the recently released Clown in a Cornfield.

Clown in a Cornfield was not based on a fake trailer from Grindhouse. It’s inspired instead by a 2020 Bram Stoker Award-winning 2020 novel by Adam Pearson, a 37-year-old with an unerring feel for the look and vibe of trashy B horror movies released in the decade before his 1988 birth.

Yet, Clown in a Cornfield, the latest effort from Eli Craig, the writer and director of the 2010 cult film Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, would feel right at home in Grindhouse.

It’s particularly redolent of Thanksgiving in its portrayal of generational conflict in a small town and Reagan-era ethos. The title recalls Grindhouse. Everything else does as well.

In Clown in a Cornfield, Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas), a plucky teen Final Girl with the requisite dead mother and dark backstory, moves with her doctor father to the tiny hamlet of Kettle Springs, Missouri.

Kettle Springs is a small town famous for being the former headquarters of the Baypen corn syrup factory. The factory has a clown mascot named Frendo who is even more ominous and nightmare-inducing than most examples of the breed.

It doesn’t take much to make a clown creepy and unnerving. Most clowns are creepy and unnerving while trying to be funny and entertaining.

In detention, Quinn meets the kind of horny teenagers that have been masked slashers favored prey since well before Halloween. There’s Cole Hill (Carson MacCormac), a pampered rich boy and the son of Arthur Hill, the town’s mayor.

Kevin Durand plays the town patriarch, an early indication that he will turn out to be a creep. To distract themselves from the dreariness of small town life, these attractive youngsters fornicate indiscrimately and shoot elaborate YouTube videos where they prank each other and the new kid, something with fake videos with a blood-crazed Frendo terrorizing the populace.

The videos have suspiciously impressive and expensive production values, almost as if they were made by professional filmmakers and not kids with cameras.

Quinn’s horny social group are forever playing dangerous pranks on one another. So when they start disappearing, it’s initially written off as nothing more than stunts gone awry.

Then, a sinister figure dressed and made up like Frendo begins slaughtering high school kids in gruesome and inventive ways.

Slashers are generally only as strong as their villains. Clown in a Cornfield has a doozy. The production and character design are retro and sinister, traditional and ominous. The overachieving shocker smartly exploits the innate human impulse to find clowns almost inconceivably sinister and repulsive.

Clown in a Cornfield is an old-school fright flick with surprisingly progressive elements. For example, the ostensible male romantic lead turns out to be queer, a development that is handled in a refreshingly matter-of-fact and non-judgmental way.

When Clown in a Cornfield reveals the identities of the clowns in the cornfield, it’s a disappointment.

The clowns are much more terrifying as an unknowable, inexplicably ominous force for death and destruction. Learning their names, backstories, and motivations distracts from the mystery and menace at the film’s retro core.

Clown in a Cornfield ends disappointingly, but it’s enough throwback fun to inspire anticipation for further entries in the series. There are two literary sequels, so the filmmaker wouldn’t need to be too original to keep this campy Grindhouse-style madness going strong.

Clown in a Cornfield lives up to the awesomeness of its title. The villains here are not my favorite posse of insane clowns. I’m more partial to Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, but they’re distinctive and memorable in their own right.

Three and a half stars out of five