How basic and hipster dumb and derivative is the SXSW slasher movie “Clown in a Cornfield?” Like many a slasher film before it, the movie is trying to launch its own iconic masked killer. But check out if any of this sounds overly familiar. The killer, named Frendo, wears the face of an evil leering clown, like Pennywise from “It,” topped by a small cocked hat like the one worn by Art the Clown in the “Terrifier” films. Frendo does indeed dispatch many of his victims in a cornfield, which means that the film’s title is perhaps the most self-consciously literal piece of high-concept branding since “Snakes on a Plane.” “Clown in a Cornfield” is based on a YA novel, but before you assume it’s the “Stranger Things” of mayhem, what the pedigree comes down to is that the victims — a group of teenagers in the small-town farm community of Kettle Springs — are as one-note and disposable as the walking-meat teen slasher characters of the ’80s. There’s a showpiece sequence set during a holiday parade down Main Street, featuring a mascot version of the killer, that’s a flagrant imitation of the one in “Thanksgiving.”
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And yet…”Clown in a Cornfield” isn’t quite so pandering as to presume that we’re unaware of all this. The film’s director, Eli Craig (“Tucker & Dale vs. Evil”), who is not incompetent (just unimaginative), has got it in his head that he’s making a “meta” slasher movie. The way “Clown in a Cornfield” presents itself, the image of Frendo is alluding to Pennywise. The title is alluding to “Snakes on a Plane.” It’s the knockoff as postmodern indie grindhouse echo chamber.
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Here’s why the film, lunkish and plodding as it is, thinks it’s meta. We learn that Frendo began life as an advertising mascot for Baypen corn syrup, a local business empire founded by the great-grandfather of Cole (Carson MacCormac), the one rich kid in town. The launch of that company literally put Kettle Springs on the map, and the town is dotted with Frendo insignia and swag, notably a hand-size Jack-in-the-box version of him that tends to show up just before the person who finds it gets slaughtered.
The meta element is that the teen characters have a running prank of staging two-minute YouTube videos, featuring one of them dressed as Frendo, that are like slasher movies in miniature. So when the real Frendo shows up (we first glimpse him, in a creepy freeze frame, leering from the background of one of the videos), it’s as if he was crashing the Halloween party he inspired.
All of which is the set-up for the film’s one true hook, which is that there’s more than one Frendo. I don’t mean in the clever whodunit fashion of the “Scream” films, where several killers will take turns playing Ghostface. This is more like a small army of Frendos, and the motivation for that — the cosmology behind the film’s homicidal logic — is so cartoonish and broad that it’s less ghoulishly unsettling than why-didn’t-a-movie-ever-try-this-before?-because-it’s-so-reductive-and-obvious. The film, in its trivial way, exudes a dyspeptic downer vibe, the result of everyone in it being so testy and unpleasant.
The heroine and final girl, Quinn (Katie Douglas), is the new arrival. She’s moved into an old farmhouse with her recently widowed physician father (Aaron Abrams), and she quickly gets absorbed into what appears to be the only teen clique in town. Cole is part of the group, and the two have a flirtation, but there’s a reason it’s not going anywhere. It has to do with what we might call the film’s social-justice twist. You might be wondering if “Clown in a Cornfield” is at least scary. No, it’s not, and it’s not trying too hard to be. The murders are served up as over-the-top set pieces, designed to make the audience cheer the mayhem. Yet most of them remain decidedly under-the-top. (Next to the “Terrifier” films, a movie like this one never comes near the danger zone.) If AI made a slasher film, it would look like “Clown in a Cornfield.”
