An old opera house is donated to a high school theater program and teacher Margot Kidder brings a group of students there to help clean up the joint. Sarah Lassez has volunteered because her mother's murder by her co-star (in the titular clown outfit) was the incident that closed the theater years ago. She's been suffering from terrible nightmares since finding out and thinks spending a lot of time in the theater will sort things out in her head. (Yeah ... sure it will)
I'm sure you know what happens. The clown killer, or someone pretending to be him, is in the theater and kids die one by one. It's a pretty standard body count slasher film that makes very little sense (the personal belongings of the murder victim are still sitting in her dressing room over a decade later) and is fairly dull and bloodless. Besides Kidder, Christopher Plummer shows up as the owner of the theater, and Tatyana Ali and James Duval are among the kids. All acquit themselves pretty well ... Plummer is actually pretty great.
I'd probably be completely dismissive of the film if it weren't for the fact that it was shot in the Walker Theatre (now the Burton Cummings Theatre) here in Winnipeg. It was an opera house in the early 20th century and became a movie theater in the 1940's. It's been a music venue since the 1990's, and was when this was shot there. I know this place very well, so it was kind of interesting seeing it on film. Even better, there's some exterior shooting that shows the surrounding neighborhood. It's kind of fun to watch for people who live here.
There's one pretty great thing involving costuming near the end that I can't describe without spoiling the ending. I'll just say, the identity of the killer leads to an amusing clown related sequence.
