You know I'm starting to believe that bad movies are becoming a guilty pleasure of mine.  A couple months ago I posted a review for a horror movie titled The Slaughterhouse Massacre and stated it as the worst movie I have ever seen.  I am sad to say that I was wrong.  Fear of Clowns, written and directed by Kevin Kangas, has now stolen that honor.

Fear of Clowns is so bad that I actually was wanting it to end.  It is so painful to watch that you just want the misery to cease.  I couldn't even tell you the name of one of the characters in this film.  I don't even think their names are even spoken.  You have to catch their names from documents or name plates on desks.

The basic plot is about an artist who has coulrophobia (that's a fear of clowns for you ignorant ones) and eases this fear by painting them.  One day (and out of the blue) some big dude dressed in a ridiculous clown costume, shows up on her patio.  She shrugs it off as stress and continues on with her life.  She meets some pretty boy dude and becomes attracted to him, but he seems a little wierd in his own right.  The clown proceeds to kill people close to her in some pretty hilarious killing scenes.  My personal favorite is towards the end when the clown kills a patrolling undercover cop with his Halloween prop axe, by cutting off the cop's "manaquin" head.  I don't know what's funnier, the axe flapping in the wind because its made of plastic, or the head flying half way down the block hitting the ground with a plastic-like THUD.

To sum it up, the main woman and her boyfriend kill the wrong guy in a clown costume and think everything is all well and done.  During a date at a movie theater the clown comes back with the woman's son as a hostage.  An embarassing game of cat and mouse pursues, until the clown "gives up" and is arrested by a group of cops that miraclously gets into the locked down theater.  The final scene, however, was a wonderfully shot sequence where the woman gets a paranormal type vision of the clown coming back to her house for her son.  She wakes up to check her son and there is the clown hovering over the boy.  

Now this movie is downright garbage.  I know I am not a filmmaker yet, but this was utterly ridiculous.  How this man Kangas is making a movie and myself not having the ability to is beyond my belief.  The plot made absolutely no sense.  It seemed Kangas was torn between a psychological thriller and an all out gore fest.  The movie started off so slowly that I began to think about what I was going to have for dinner tonight.  At the end, the movie turns into a ruthless killing spree, in broad daylight nonetheless, and becomes even more silly.  The actors were very funny.  I looked them all up on IMDB and it was every single ones' first movie.  They looked like they had never been in front of a camera before, except for the boyfriend character.  He was a decent actor, but everyone else sucked big donkey nutz (pardon my analogy).

The clown was not scary at all.  His facepaint looked as if it was not finished.  Only half his face had a mouth painted on.  The other half was his real mouth.  Did they run out of paint?  Who knows.  

The only good thing about this film was the end.  And I don't mean it in the way that the movie was over, but that the last scene was truly a good scene.  Kangas shot an incredible hallucination scene that looked very mainstream.  Why he did not shoot the rest of his movie in this manner I do not know.  If he would have kept the movie as a psychological thriller it could have been pretty good.  The clown was a better antagonist when he was lurking in the shadows and the viewer could not tell if he was in the vicinity or not.

The song during the end credits was one of the best songs I have ever heard for the ending of a movie.  If anyone has any songs by the band Unfaith, especially a song called Whisper, please let me know.  The band is awesome.

1/2 out ****