- Directed by Damien Leone
- Written by Damien Leone
- Stars Katie Maguire, Catherine A. Callahan
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 23 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCbgfnVXM3I
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
An anthology of tales, and Art the Clown makes his debut. It’s clearly a low-budget indie, but it’s overall very good and well worth the watch.
Synopsis
It’s Halloween. Tia and Timmy argue with Sarah the babysitter about bedtime and candy. The boy finds a videotape in his trick or treat bag. Both kids want to watch the tape. The tape has a weird clown and some scary location shots. Then the story starts.
A woman sits alone in a train station on Halloween night. She sees the clown from earlier, but he doesn’t say anything. He honks a horn and does annoying mime stuff. Then he injects her with something and she hallucinates some weird stuff before she passes out.
Casey wakes up chained in the dark. There are three women there; “This is where he keeps us,” one explains. Sara and Kristen are the other two girls. Suddenly, Sara gets pulled away, most likely to her death. Next, a mutated monster (Toxic Avenger?) grabs Kristen and cuts her arm off.
Casey breaks her chain with a rock and runs into the tunnels. She runs into a hobo and the next thing she knows, she’s tied up and surrounded by cultists. There’s a pregnant woman there, and one of the cultists cuts the baby out of her. The cultists tear her clothes off and Satan walks in to have sex with her…
Sarah turns off the TV and sends Timmy and Tia to bed; she says that was too grown up for them. Sarah tells Tia that monsters don’t exist; Tia says the clown could be real, like a serial killer. Later, Sarah puts the tape back in and watches some more of it.
The tape starts up again. Catherine is at home unpacking boxes at her new house. Her husband John is an artist. She’s creeped out by his latest painting, an ugly face that John doesn’t remember painting. Later, the power goes out and her phone stops working. Her car is dead too.
She thinks something landed near the house. John calls, and he says to call the police. Then the phone cuts out again. Yes, it turns out there are aliens in her house. There is some cat-and-mouse hide-and-seek, and as it finally gets her, she unveils John’s painting– it’s the clown from the first segment.
Sarah thinks she sees something in the house, and she gets a little paranoid. Then she goes downstairs to finish that tape…
A woman drives alone at night on Halloween. She stops in at the last-chance gas station where she finds the attendant yelling at the clown we saw earlier. The attendant goes inside, leaving her alone outside. She goes inside and finds the clown sawing the attendant into little pieces.
She jumps in the car and drives away. Then a few miles down the road, she sees the clown on the side of the road and crashes. She drives away again but stops when she finds another crashed car; inside is a horribly wounded woman.
When the clown appears in the back seat, she gets out of the car and runs through the woods. She hides out in a barn, but the clown tunnels his way inside. She turns the tables on him and stabs him several times.
She runs outside and flags down a car. The clown drives up next to them and then the clown shoots the driver. She wakes up in the clown’s lair, and that’s really bad- he’s amputated all her limbs.
Sarah turns off the VCR. Then she gets a phone call from the woman in the previous segment of the video phoning for help. The TV comes back on and she sees the clown again. He walks over to the camera and looks right at Sarah and waves. Then she sees herself on TV with the clown sitting right behind her. She breaks the videotape.
That doesn’t help the two dead kids upstairs though. Good luck explaining that when the parents get home…
Commentary
Art the Clown would, of course, soon reappear in both “Terrifier” (2016) and “Terrifier 2” (2022) as his own thing, but here, he’s just a character in an anthology.
The segment with the alien is pretty basic and simple, but the other parts were really good, in a low-budget kind of way. Actually, the first and third segments were filmed years prior to the second tale and the wraparound story.
It’s very cheap looking and the middle segment is really weak, but overall, I liked it.