Wrinkles the Clown

This was a pretty boring documentary about a clown that can be called by parents to scare their kids if they don't behave. It all started when in 2015 a video was uploaded to YouTube where a clown was shown emerging from underneath a bed in a young girl's room. After the clip went viral, apparently lots of parents actually called The Clown by the name of Wrinkles and actually hired him to scare their kids for misbehaving. Four years later this documentary comes out showing the man living his simple life in his van talking to the camera about his experiences as Wrinkles the Clown.

Towards the end there's some sort of twist that tells us the whole truth and if you are generally interested in this whole story you might enjoy this but I was but throughout its rather short runtime. [3,9/10]

This is one of the extremely rare cases where I turned a movie off. It was such an interesting idea, and they completely squandered it. There's no sense of order, you could recut the majority of this movie and it would not make a difference, if it weren't for a twist that rendered the first half of the doc a waste of time.

This is the cinematic equivalent to reading the comments on YouTube video called "scary 3:00 AM challenge". It is largely just kids yapping into cellphone cameras about spooky clowns. They even often fail to give an opinion. It fails at exploring its topic with any kind of depth and comes across as extremely lazy.

Let me save you 78 minutes. See that guy on the poster? Parents can hire him to scare misbehaving children. You learn nothing more by watching this film.

Is this documentary about "Wrinkles the Clown" as a person? Sorta. Is it about the clown hysteria from a few years ago, and how people reacted to it? It could've been with more focus. Is it about the behind the scenes of making modern day folklore? Again, it could've been with more focus. This documentary, as a concept, could've been incredibly interesting if it decided what it wanted to be. Instead it meanders on "clowns are scary" for a good portion of it's runtime. It's shot well, but with odd (and occasionally bad) editing & pacing. If 30-50 minutes were cut from this it would be a much more solid piece (but if they did that it wouldn't be considered "featured length" anymore.) Ultimately, this probably would've been better as an episode of a mini-series about some related theme (modern day/online horror and how people react to it, etc.)

I was excited to see this after I saw the trailer, but was severely disappointed. This documentary could've been 10 minutes long. There really is no point. The production quality is good, but that's it. The "twist" in the final half hour is lazy and only served to make me angry. Save yourself the hour and a half and watch something else instead.

Not the best documentary but worth checking out. Had some good horror moments and if your like everyone else and hates clowns you will be creeped out.