Clownstrophobia – Film Reel Reviews

Half the movie makes sense, the other half doesn’t and I don’t have the patience to watch again. – Will

A young boy kills his parents while dressed like a clown causing his sister to have a fear of clowns. Years later she’s a psychologist who decides to overcome her fear by holding a group therapy session with some juvenile delinquents who share her fear. It’s also the same night her brother escapes the asylum.

Directed by – Geraldine Winters, Daniel Dowding

Starring – Thomas Daniel, Theresa Galeani, Rocco George, Chris Luperi, Bobby Max, Ebru Yonak

I’m sorry, but everything about this movie is a mess. Even trying to find info about it was terribly hard. I can’t find a writing credit for it and that cast list I have above doesn’t come close to covering all the actors. Sure I could go back and watch the credits but I’d rather not submit myself to that. Clownstrophobia is like two movies in one. One of the movies follows the psychologist as she holds a group therapy session with some troubled teens which goes to hell when her psycho brother shows up and starts killing everyone. That part isn’t too bad actually. Yes, the acting is awful, the editing was bad and the dialogue was hopeless but it at least had some blood and a creepy looking clown killer. Too bad the killer clowns name was Snuffles because I couldn’t stop chuckling every time someone said his name.

The other movie that seems to be going on here involves the asylum when the killer clown dude was kept. There’s a Patient X there, a young woman, who was found outside of a carnival. She’s obsessed with clowns and keeps talking about her baby that they took away. Nobody knows anything about a baby though and there is a slight suggestion that the killer clown guy is her baby. That makes no sense at all. Let me attempt to explain why. The psychologist holding the group therapy is the sister of the killer clown and he killed his parents. If Patient X is his mother then he didn’t kill his parents at all. Also, the psychologist is easily ten years older than Patient X. Maybe insanity keeps you young. No matter what the answer, all the scenes involving Patient X make no sense at all, don’t seem to fit anywhere in the story aside from taking place in the same asylum where the clown guy was and were boring as hell.

Alright, let me try to get myself centered here because there’s plenty wrong with this movie and I want to get it all straight. The movie starts with the Patient X story which never makes any sense so forget all about it. Then the psychologist reveals what happened to her as a child when her brother killed their parents while dressed like a clown. Now she’s afraid of clowns and wants a group therapy session with others who have the same fear thinking it will help her. While she prepares for that we switch to the asylum where her brother is held. There’s a costume party going on and to start things up they put her brother in a room with another inmate to make them fight it out, then the orderlies go about getting hammered and having sex. One orderly is dressed like a clown and starts to have sex with a nurse right in front of the brother. Oops, someone forgot to lock his door and he walks out, kills the orderly and takes his costume.

Meanwhile the psychologist gets a bunch of teens for her group therapy session at her house. They’re all troubled teens, real bad asses. Like the girl who put hair remover in the cheerleaders shampoo bottles or the guy who called a bomb threat into the school by telling the cops that his principal’s pacemaker was a nuclear weapon. Wow, the real bottom of the barrel of society here folks. A cop who drops the teens off at the house even remarks how they’re destined for death row because we all now that making cheerleaders bald is the first step to getting the death penalty. Soon enough crazy clown brother Snuffles shows up and kills everyone. The end.

This was exactly how I felt while watching! Ironic that they would put it in the movie.

I like Snuffles, except for his name of course. He’s pretty creepy looking and does some brutal damage to a few of the people involved. There’s a few scenes with some good blood thrown around and Snuffles randomly pulls organs out of his victims. Thankfully this indie flick delivers some blood. Too bad it’s not even close enough to make up for all its problems. The whole Patient X thing is annoying and makes no sense and the behaviour of the staff at the asylum is ridiculous. I would expect them to be stupid, how else would Snuffles escape, but what they do goes above and beyond stupidity. The editing of the flick is horrendous. There are 4 teens in the house, 2 psychologists and 1 cop. That’s 7 people and Snuffles kills 7 people, but one of the teens gets away. Somehow there’s a random girl who gets killed and I don’t know where the hell she came from. Thanks for adding an extra kill in there but you could’ve taken the time to explain who she was or where she came from. Hell, maybe I missed that part because I wasn’t really paying attention.

Clowns are creepy, the flick has that going for it!

This one is just too terrible to watch. It has a bit of nice violence and I like watching a clown guy cut out people’s organs but that’s only 10 minutes out of 80. The rest of the flick is a disaster all around. The main character of the psychologist sister is dispatched without a second thought. Alive one minute, dead the next. We don’t even get to see how Snuffles captures her. Shouldn’t that be the main part of the story when the brother finally kills the sister? One of the teens has a nasty gash on his leg but I don’t remember how he got it until he gets a piece of glass stuck there. How lucky that the piece of glass got stuck in the same spot he already had a cut! I can’t forget the random victim that gets killed even though I don’t know who they are, where they came from or how they got there. Body count is important though so throw them in there any way you can.

Thanks to Clownstrophobia I now have a terrible fear of bad movies. Obviously the only cure is to watch more of them and I’m pretty sure I’ll end up doing that. Anything to save you guys 80 minutes of your life.

Under the marquee – Will

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