Les Clowns tueurs venus d'ailleurs

This magnificently nonsensical eighties flick, which reveals the hideousness, perversity and degeneracy of clowns, was very aptly described by one viewer as “the best 1950s sci-fi B-movie that wasn’t made in the 1950s”. This unique project by the Chiodo brothers, who otherwise work as special-effects artists on Hollywood productions and are specialists in animatronic effects (e.g. Critters and Team America), is pure camp. The film literally and self-indulgently revels in the overwrought tastelessness of the eighties mainstream while simultaneously pushing it to an entirely absurd level by means of the titular killer clowns from outer space and, especially, phantasmagorical ideas about the clowns’ weapons and methods of killing. (13/01/2013)