director/screenwriter
Victor Salva
producers
Michael Danty
Robin Mortarotti
Victor Salva
cinematographer
Robin Mortarotti
music
Michael Becker
Thomas Richardson
editors
Roy Anthony Cox
Sabrina Plisco-Morris
cast
Nathan Forrest Winters (Casey)
Brian McHugh (Geoffrey)
Sam Rockwell (Randy)
Michael Jerome West (Lunatic Cheezo)
Bryan Weible (Lunatic Bippo)
David C. Reinecker (Lunatic Dippo)
Viletta Skillman (Mother)
Gloria Belsky (Fortune Teller)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 81m
u.s.
release: 1988
video
availability: VHS
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A movie like Clownhouse
-- and, fortunately, there aren't too many like them -- really
tests a reviewer's ability to separate content from context.
Nonetheless, one must try, at least momentarily. Clownhouse
is a better-than-average chiller wherein three boys are terrorized
by escaped mental patients dressed as clowns. Viewers suffering
from coulrophobia (fear
of clowns), like the movie's young protagonist Casey (Nathan
Forrest Winters), might want to give the film a wide berth. What
the movie sets out to do, it more or less accomplishes, and the
performances of the three juvenile leads -- including then-19-year-old
Sam Rockwell as the oldest brother, a taunting prick not unlike
Bill Paxton in Weird Science -- are solid and credible,
which is good, since we spend most of our time with them. At
its best, Clownhouse taps into our unreasonable distrust
of those greasepainted mirth-pushers, gets its jolts more from
shadow and suspense than from gore, and would stand as a minor
overlooked classic about kids vs. evil were it not for the discomfiting
fact that the very same conflict took place behind the scenes,
and evil won.
Very few people other than
horror completists and Sam Rockwell fans would even know Clownhouse
exists today if not for the sins of its maker, writer-director
Victor Salva, whose feature debut this was. When Salva's later
movie Powder, made for Disney, was about to open in 1995,
Clownhouse star Nathan Forrest Winters stood up and protested
Disney's bankrolling of Salva's career. Reason? Because Salva,
before and during the shooting of Clownhouse, had molested
the then-12-year-old Winters (and videotaped it). Sentenced to
three years in prison, Salva served fifteen months, completing
parole in 1992. The press had a field day with this information,
finding many newly creepy resonances in Powder, and Disney
quickly distanced itself from the hot potato. Luckily for Salva,
he had (and presumably still has) a guardian angel in Francis
Ford Coppola, whose company American Zoetrope produced Clownhouse
as well as Salva's career-saving Jeepers Creepers films.
Why Coppola didn't turn his back on the Fredo in his filmmaking
family is anyone's guess; perhaps Coppola improbably sees Salva
as a sort of Michael Corleone circa Godfather III, a sinner
who deserves a chance to redeem himself.
And indeed, Salva seems to
be trying to keep his end of the bargain; no further evidence
of his pedophilia has risen to the surface, at least not outside
his films (viewers who know Salva's backstory have reported many
strange details and fixations in the Jeepers Creepers
movies, neither of which I've seen). But Clownhouse, watched
in light of what Salva is and did, becomes a truly horrifying
glimpse into a diseased mind. It should be seen (though I'd recommend
borrowing it through interlibrary loan, if you can, and not making
yourself feel soiled by paying to see it) if only because it
is a rare cinematic document of a not-well-understood sickness.
And, boy, does Clownhouse play on a whole other level
once you know a pedophile made it.
The three brothers in the film
-- young bed-wetting Casey (Winters), sensible middle child Geoffrey
(Brian McHugh), and the aforementioned bully Randy (Rockwell)
-- spend two-thirds of the film isolated (their parents are out
for the night) and threatened by three silent, menacing men.
One of them is an eye-rolling baldy who fixates on balloon animals
and later tries to make one out of a human being. The other two
are hulking slobberers, much like society's general mental image
of child molesters. (Salva himself, seen briefly in a crowd scene
at the carny, looked a bit slimmer and more presentable than
he does now -- he seems to have morphed into one of the heavy-set
evil clowns.)
Salva has said (in this useful interview from 1999) that when
he was a kid devouring horror movies, he felt bad for the monster:
"When someone in the movie pointed and screamed, 'Arrrrgh,
he's so hideous! He's so ugly!' I thought, 'No, the monster is
the most interesting thing about the movie. I wonder what he's
thinking and feeling." Oddly, this never comes through in
Clownhouse; we're meant to identify with young, fearful
Casey, not the clown-faced murderers. Casey is more or less constantly
bombarded with unwanted physical attention, from his eldest brother
as well as the three psychos. Far from being the defense of pedophilia
you might expect (though much has been made of the scenes when
Casey or Geoffrey are shirtless or even bare-assed), Clownhouse
plays like Salva's self-loathing mirror on himself. Clowns are
weird, sometimes intimidating grown-ups entrusted with children;
Salva may have been viewing himself as the evil clown preying
on Casey, who, in real life, was left in Salva's care by trusting
parents (who later bitterly regretted it).
Salva refers to his sex crime
as "a stupid mistake," but by "mistake" does
he just mean he got caught at it? The conventional wisdom is
that pedophiles are never "cured"; the obsession is
part of their hard-wiring, and all that can really be done with
them after they've served their time is to keep a close eye on
their movements. Or, in Salva's case, their movies. But Clownhouse
is also an indelible document of pain as well as sickness. There
he is, poor Nathan Forrest Winters, cringing in fear in one scene
after another, reliving symbolically on film what he was enduring
in the dark after-hour shadows of the movie set or in Salva's
home. Winters' terror is all too real, and becomes unbearably
dismaying to watch. The other two boys in the film are acting;
Winters isn't, quite. Am I recommending Clownhouse? In
and of itself, divorced from the reality behind it, it's a serviceable
thriller with some truly odd touches (the boys' mother and a
fortune-teller they encounter at the carny both seem like chubby
drag queens). Viewed in its real-life context, it becomes exponentially
distasteful and squalid, moreso than any 42nd-street European
zombie dreck that depicts the slaughter of actual animals. Should
Clownhouse be viewed outside this context? What's more
important, life or movies?
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