What I'm Watching: Clown Hunt
Or, what I wish I never watched.
Let that sink in. A movie I wish I had never watched.
Clown Hunt... Oh, Clown Hunt. What can I say about this movie?
Not much, really, because there isn't much TO it. The joke is in the title; rednecks in the brush hunting clowns.
Why? Who knows.
Now, normally, you might not even care, if the movie was at least entertaining enough, but not this movie, ohhhh no.
The movie started off entertainingly enough. It jars you with some hip hop song about the awesomeness of killing clowns. Okay, that makes me smile. There's some weirdness setting up the idea which is again fun enough, but the promise of those first five minutes is quickly wasted and forgotten.
There just is not much I can say about this movie. There isn't much to it! A bunch of rednecks go out to hunt clowns, because that's socially acceptable for no readily explained reason, and THAT IS IT. That is the entire movie. Rednecks hunting clowns. Until the clowns get armed and hunt back.
The movie can't be bothered to really set up or explain the fiction of its own universe, and we are just supposed to accept that hunting clowns is okay, and just something people do. They treat clown hunting like any other animal hunting, treat the clowns like animals, there's different hunting seasons...but they're clowns! They're people! They can stop being clowns! Can't they? Well, obviously they can, since some regular people are closeted clowns, and sometimes go clown and join the tribe and...this just makes zero sense after only a second of thought. They could have come up with something here, but they just can't be bothered.
During the course of the movie, which claims to be 90 minutes but the run time doesn't even go an hour ten, people keep making that old joke we probably all know about "How come we don't eat clowns? Because they taste funny!" Part of me is SO sure that the makers of this movie were familiar with that joke, and thought, "Yeah! What if we DID eat clowns? What if we hunted them??" That's a good germ of an idea, except when you have the people in the movie making the joke, it doesn't make sense. Because they're now hunting clowns! AND eating them! It's like a deer hunter making jokes about not hunting, killing, and eating deer, while he's building the fire to do just that. It makes no sense.
There was a chance for this movie, they could have gone the route of political or social satire, building a universe around clown hunting, and using it to comment on our own love of hunting, and you almost start to think they're going to go there based on those first few minutes. There are protestors not unlike animal rights activists, there's some illicit activity going on that makes it seem like there is a downside to hunting...but it is quickly tossed aside, like everything else in this movie, to watch people hunt clowns for an hour. THAT IS IT.
Clown Hunt is summed up by two thoughts; First, a bunch of wasted opportunity with an idea that could have actually gone somewhere. And second, it just makes no sense. If they had done something, ANYthing with the idea, maybe it could have justified a 90 minute run time, but as it stands, they can't even justify a single hour.
And if my opinion just isn't enough, go watch Cinema Snob's review, which pretty much echoes all my thoughts. Or I echo his, for things I didn't explicitly say.
I didn't even get around to mentioning the clown rape. As in, rape by a clown. I have now witnessed a man raped by a clown. This is not something my brain can undo easily.
Fucking clown shoes, man...
J
