Travel back to the heyday of Canuxploitation Tax Shelter Cinema in this 4K release from Kino Cult!
One of the best parts about being a collector in the golden era of 4K boutique labels is that you come across some real obscure titles getting incredible releases. Sure, we’ll continue to get latest and greatest version and packagings of things like The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, or another “definitive” additions of Blade Runner, but the last few years have netted not only holy grail releases like Hard Boiled and The Keep, but a bevy of truly little known oddities finally getting not only true releases, but done up with all the bells and whistles.
One of the newer labels that have been doing their damndest to get these titles out there is Kino Cult. Like similar labels, such as Vinegar Syndrome and Something Weird Video, Kino Cult specializes in looking for the true outsider films, the real oddities, and giving them pristine restorations, and in some cases, giving them the only true release they’ve ever gotten. Recent releases include the notorious Ilsa films (I reviewed the one where she’s a She Wolf in both Siberia and Canada) and the documentary/Mondo curio Hell’s Highway (another one I reviewed!).
Recently, for the Halloween season, Kino Cult released The Clown Murders on 4K. Originally released in 1976, The Clown Murders follows a group of young and rich slackers who decide to stage a Halloween prank on one of the group’s ex-girlfriends, with all of them disguised as clowns. Things quickly get out of hand, though, and tensions begin to flare as the situation becomes more and more serious. Even worse; someone has decided to start killing off the clown capers, and no one knows who’s doing it.
The Clown Murders is a bit of a deep cut, to say the least. Mostly known for co-starring an incredibly fresh faced John Candy, it was usually relegated to those “100 scariest movies” omnibus collections you’d buy for 5 bucks, or given some god awful cover art to try and lure in unsuspecting consumers (many of you might actually recognize this one from this specific terrible artwork that the DVD used to sport). Now, after years of obscurity, it gets a nice new 4k release, with its own slip, too!
Is it any good? Not really! The first 30 minutes are admittedly the most interesting, as we watch a group of friends/enemies pushing each other buttons and steering each other into oblivion as they concoct a Halloween “prank”; one that starts innocent enough on paper but quickly becomes more mean spirited as the night goes on. The growing tension makes it feel like it is about to turn into something like Very Bad Things, where everything starts to spiral out for our grease-paint wearing idiots.
But it never really does that. Instead, the movie essentially stalls out after about 30 minutes as they all begin arguing with each other on a small farm. About what you ask? Couldn’t tell ya, because the argument not only changes every scene, but we seem to always come into it about halfway in, with no real context clues about how we got here (there is something about a mine in Latin America closing that keeps coming up that is never even kinda explained). It’s just a lot of dudes passive aggressively arguing while a “kidnap victim” kinda just lounges about bored upstairs.
But then, there’s also a killer stalking all of them? That also doesn’t seem to be connected with the whole kidnapping plot, and was just hanging out at the house when they showed up? And there’s also a cavalcade of red herrings and Chekhov’s guns everywhere that don’t ever lead to anything. It feels like a script that has all these random elements from other scripts shoehorned into, leading to a conclusion that makes just absolutely zero sense.
But, anyone in the movie collecting game knows that the question of “is it any good?” isn’t really all that important. The idea of physical media collecting is something closer to replicating those old video store days, when all you had to go on was cover art and a brief description on the back. Hell, the actual reality of “good or bad” changes when it’s a real box with a real disc. If a streaming movie sucks after 5 minutes, I’m bouncing out of there by minute 6. But, when you’ve got the movie actually there in front of you, there is a natural buy-in, a drive to get to the end, come hell or high water. Who knows; maybe they’ll turn it all around in the end?
The Clown Murders doesn’t really turn it around in the end, somehow becoming more and more confusing as it heads into the ending (there isn’t really even a climax here; it kinda just ends). But, in that way, I still found myself walking away with something here. The Clown Murders is such a strange, strange film that very clearly lost the plot of its own film and just kinda spiralled into nothing as it went. I actually found myself appreciating that, watching a film just lose its center and never regaining it. It’s not something I’d probably ever return to, but it’s also something I can’t see myself forgetting, either.
And that’s the roulette of blind buying, baby!
