Main cast: Dalton Letta (Marcus), Roselyn Kasmire (Amy), Biz LaChance (James), Adrian Esposito (Rosco), Arlowe Price (Jingles), Greg Lentz (Jekko), Luther LeBron Layne (Jester), and John Karyus (Mr Punch)
Directors: Adrian Esposito and Curt Markham
In the golden days of pre-corporate YouTube, content creators invariably decided that they would make a movie after their popularity hit a certain peak. How hard can that be, right? Just get people to finance the movie by donating to them, they will get their friends to act in it even as they of course direct and be the main star, and voila, a movie! This is how the world is plagued with cringe inducers such as Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie.
This is also how we get things like this.
Clown in the Woods is the result of people crowdfunding this thing on Indiegogo a while back. No, I didn’t back this one, and I don’t even know of its genesis until I look it up later in my quest to figure out why and how this thing came to be.
Adrian Esposito has his fingerprints on every aspect of this film, in front of and behind the scenes, so I guess congratulations are in order for his successful hustling and rustling to make his dream come true. However, this also means that this thing is unleashed on a streaming service, and yikes, at least put a warning on the poster or something.
Basically, we have a bunch of adult actors playing… teens? Young adults? It doesn’t matter. One of them dies in a prank and his ghost somehow joins a posse of ghost clowns to unleash havoc on his tormentors. His only friend, Amy who is also a lesbian because current year, tries to look into the matter and become the final girl without humiliating herself too much in the process.
I don’t know what to say about this one. Mr Esposito makes it clear, through marketing materials of this movie, that he is on the spectrum, so he’s doing that representation thing, yadda yadda TL; DR: if I don’t like this movie even a little, I am giving ammunition to blue check marks on social media to scream that I am a bigot, and I deserve to be cancelled and have my life ruined.
Then again, I’ve already lost by watching this movie, so what have I to further lose, right?
People can sugarcoat all they want about this thing and indeed, the kindest things one can say are, perhaps, how wonderful it is that everyone can make their dreams come true because of crowdfunding (insert ad for those platforms here—call me, Indiegogo!), and how everyone should celebrate Mr Esposito for completing this movie because we hold such people by a lower standard than we hold ourselves.
The sad truth is that this movie reeks of amateur hour, or to be precise, amateur 90 minutes. The lighting is off, so there isn’t much horror atmosphere to be had here. The acting is participation trophy tier, and there is really nothing to say about special effects considering that this movie had to make do with a budget of about 30 grand. The plot seems interesting on paper, but this movie is never going to make it work due to the inadequacies of everyone and everything involved in this thing.
There are some almost good things here, in that scenes are competently filmed for the most part, with no odd angles or other mishaps, but I’m not sure whether “The cinematography is adequate!” is a good reason to watch this thing now.
Clowns in the Woods is what it is: amateur hour that makes everyone involved in or had backed this thing happy, but woe betide any unsuspecting person that stumbles upon this on a streaming service.
