'Clownado' Is Too Incoherent to Be Cult

Directed by Todd Sheets

Starring John O'Hara, Rachel Lagen, Bobby Westrick

BY Allie GregoryPublished Sep 30, 2019

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What happens when a circus witch curses a gang of mafia clowns? Clownado, obviously. You can take that literally: the entire basis of Todd Sheets' B-horror is that there's a tornado of possessed clowns in town, and for vague reasons, they're on a murderous rampage.
 
Shot like a sweaty soft-core porn, Sheets delivers a campy low-budget hillbilly slasher with just enough plot holes to draw comparisons to frustratingly stupid films like The Room, Snakes on a Plane and its obviously predecessor, Sharknado.
 
For something as ridiculous a premise as a clown tornado, you'd think that there would be some value in a hate watch. But Clownado stops just short of being a cult contender for its lack of even a modicum of a cohesive plot line. It will at least please anyone with a clown fetish, as the film has no shortage of overdrawn erotic clown content.
 
While the special effects leave a lot to be desired, there's something at least mildly entertaining in watching a lady clown try to bite the face off a dude using only her prosthetic nipple-teeth. And for a laugh, the town's local strip club is named Stinky Pink, and serves as the location for the film's greatest and most over-acted line from Bambi, the unemployed dancer: "Keep your lid on daddy-o! There is no Mr. Bambi."
 
Beyond that, the acting is worse than you could expect. Leading lady Rachel Lagen flip-flops between bad and terrible in her role as Savanna, adopting a variety of random accents for no apparent reason, while barely managing to convey any emotion besides "uneasy." Meanwhile the maniacal clown laughter from Big Ronnie (John O'Hara) and his juggalo posse is awkward and boring, adding to the effect that Clownado is less like an actual gang of circus freaks bent on indiscriminate homicide than it is an edgy teen's cringe-y murder fantasy.
 
But is Clownado worth a watch? An hour and a half of bad effects, half-baked one-liners and borderline racism and misogyny is sure to be someone's cup of tea, right? The answer really comes down to how much you hate yourself.
 
(Extreme Entertainment)

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