Clown in a Cornfield

A name like "Clown in a Cornfield" promises the kind of pulp-like over-the-top violence and self-awareness that made director Eli Craig's Tucker and Dale vs. Evil so much fun. What we got is something tame and forgettable. Something that isn't nearly as smart as it thinks it is. It tries to be a combination of Children of the Corn, IT, Scream, and others but comes away as less than the sum of its parts.

The story plays like a lesser version of Eli Roth's Thanksgiving. Group of kids being picked off by a masked killer for some perceived crime. But the characters aren't nearly as well defined as Roth's were. There's little suspense built up as the Clown just keeps popping up. Plenty of gore, but no particularly memorable kill. Frendo is pretty tame as a slasher killer, doing nothing to stand out. Not helped by the fact that the Terrifier series has so completely cornered the market on creepy clown villains.

There's some playfulness with the main group playing pranks on each other for YouTube, TikTok, etc. But this largely becomes an excuse to dismiss characters not being around after they have been killed.

The acting is okay at best. Will Sasso seems to be hamming it up. Kevin Durand is doing his usual good job. But the kids are unremarkable.

Then there's the ending. The kind of lousy finale all too common with the latter Scream films, with the mask coming off and the villain monologuing about their motives giving the heroes time to escape. Worse, the dialogue is far too on-the-nose like was taken from a Tumblr rant.

It promises lots of fun but ultimately is forgettable once the credits start rolling.

I was expecting something great here because of the hype here scoring this movie so high. Didn't read anything about it because I have watched hundreds of slashers. So, consequently there are only a few movies that are really fresh or innovates in the genre. Not this movie.

First, if you have watched similar movies you can predict almost everything. Usual script of a bunch of kids ready to be slaughtered by some clowns. The problem here is that acting is horrendous so consequently you want that everybody dies as soon as possible.

Second, gory parts are great. It doesn't look cheap at all. Good for the fx's and make up team.

Last, the ending ruins everything. Wants to be clever, modern and cool. Not for me.

So, if you were born after 2005 this movie can be for you. If you have watched similar ones, this one is just another clown movie.

This flick was based off on recent horror related young adult fiction by Adam Cesare and was just average. It offers some good practical and cgi gore effects, full of tongue-in-cheek humor.

It offers an inclusive grouping of characters probably that the current administration wouldn't approve of. One of the characters kinda looks like Elon Musk!

The only that original is the intergenerational jokes between older and younger characters. Things like a rotary dial phone, etc. Comes off pretty funny. The clowns were not a creepy as many reviewers have claimed.

The acting chops were not above average, but not horrible. The film is most likely coming at a time where producers are responding to clown with extreme violence like the recent success of Damian Leone's "Terrifier" franchise.

This film has probably got popularity of a new generation of filmgoers trying to feel the 80s/90s straight to gore films. In the way, their new interest is probably to chase folk horror and more subtle horror like "Midsummer" and "The Witch" away

I guess this film by Eli Craig should be indebt to "Terrifier"-crowd funders and independent horror supporters. It's need to be said that Craig is also a trendsetter with horror comedy like "Tucker and Dale vs Evil" (obviously inspired by "Evil Dead" franchise).

I went in to this hoping it was a throwback to 80's slasher comedies, but nah, it's just another boring generic Blumhouse inspired slasher with no personality to distinguish itself away from others like it. Production wise it had good sfx and dialogue, but the lighting was so flat I felt like I was watching a Nickelodeon tv movie. Contrast is your friend, not your enemy. Sure, there were some scenes where I was like "OMG the gaffer actually showed up to work today!" so there's that. The deaths were pretty good, and the practical FX delivers most of the times, so kudos to the crew who worked on the stunts. But, with that being said, the script/story was milquetoast cookie cutter "Gen Z bad" trope garbage.

If you want to skip this and just watch Thanksgiving a watch instead, I suggest it. At least that movie was fun. However, I don't want to downplay the people who worked on the film to make the death scenes memorable. Kudos to them.

What made Adam Ceasare's book so great was that we really got to know the characters, and had long enough in the terrifying situations to really soak them in. The movie, on the other hand, feels like it flies by. It's fun, quick paced, and Quinn Maybrook is still an undeniably fun character. I loved the humor injected throughout, and every kill is great. I just wish the movie was perhaps 20 minutes longer so that we could really feel the horror elements. Ultimately it feels like they rush by the scary parts and overemphasize the message of the movie.

There's also a huge change from the book in how and why the final attack occurs, and I am not a big fan of the change.