Who's this clown then? Well, Shivers is his name apparently, he's an odd sort of clown, the sort with a wonky yellow toothed rictus of a grin painted onto his face (applied rather too well for a madman it might be said), and who carries ballooons in one hand and a medieval axe in the other. He's an outright maniac who has conversations with voices inside his head and is intent on getting 'better'. Sadly, his method for getting better consists of chopping people up with that axe he carries. The person he wants to kill in particular is our heroine Lynn, an enitirely unsurprisingly attractive blonde. Why he wants to kill her you'll have to watch this wannabe-chiller to find out but suffice to say, it doesn't make any sense at all.

Looking every bit as cheap as it no doubt was to make, Fear of Clowns is a game attempt at a psycho-clown shocker which despite trying really really hard only just about manages to raise the level of interest neccessary to keep you awake long enough to finish watching it. There is just too much blandness on display here from the very pedestrian lighting scheme which insures everything is visible but does precisely nothing for atmosphere or dramatic tension to the acting, much of which is of a monotonous, almost painfully amateur, quality.

The script does very little to help matters with such straight, character-less dialogue that at times it seems as though it were written by a suicidal tax man. The story beneath the drabness of the language however is one of the brighter points of this movie. It takes its time to set up the characters and gives them a little more humanity than you might expect from a film about a serial killing clown. There is also a little more rhyme and reason given to the events that occur than is usual in this sort of fare and that is refreshing indeed. It is a shame that is let down so badly by falling to the same old unfeasible plot contrivances which litter many poor movies - the cops who flat-out refuse to believe a murder witness's statement that they have the wrong man and that the real killer is definitely still out there for example.

There is not an a huge amount of gore in this film, it goes for the psychological scares more than the gross-out most of the time, but when it is required it is handled exceptionally well. There is a very neat beheading effect which could stand its own against most mainstream films' effects. The make-up on Shivers himself is also nicely designed and could have looked extremely creepy had we not seen so damn much of him. The first reveal of the villain works very well but from then on he pops up with such frequency that he is on screen almost as much as the heroine. He is also seen far too often in full daylight and ends up looking like exactly what he actually is- a big bald bloke dressed in a silly suit creeping around trying to look evil. Not very scary at all.

The musical score is similarly ineffective and despite its ominous rumblings and dischordant wailings only ever comes across as melodramatic rather than the disturbing darkness it was probably aiming at. This typifies what is wrong with Fear of Clowns; it just consistently misses the mark.

Writer/director Kevin Kanga is probably capable of producing a good film but this ,unfortunately, is not it. He should take a good hard long look back at Jaws and realise that in the case of killer clowns as with killer sharks less is definitely more. This is not a complete train wreck of a movie, it just doesn't work and that is alot more than can be said for many films with much higher budgets and more experienced cast than this.

6/10

Review By Matt Compton