CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD (2025)

Studio:   RLJE Films/Shudder
Director: Eli Craig
Writer:   Carter Blanchard, Eli Craig
Producer: Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner, John Fischer, Paris Kassidokostas-Latsis, Terry Dougas
Stars:    Katie Douglas, Aaron Abrams, Carson MacCormac, Vincent Muller, Kevin Durand, Will Sasso

Review Score:

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Summary:

Teenagers are terrorized by killer clowns in a small Missouri town hiding a dark history.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

In the small Missouri town of Kettle Springs in 1991, local teenagers enjoy an annual party held at an old barn formerly belonging to the Baypen Brand Corn Syrup company. High-schoolers Jessica Davis and Tyler Anderson sneak away for an intimate moment in the surrounding cornfield, but they are unexpectedly slaughtered by someone dressed as Baypen’s revered clown mascot Frendo.

In the present day, 17-year-old Quinn Maybrook reluctantly moves from Philadelphia to Kettle Springs with her widower father Glenn, who accepted a job as the town’s new doctor. Rust Vance, an odd loner who also attends Kettle Springs High School, warns Quinn to watch out for weirdos while walking her to her first day of school.

Classmates play a prank on their teacher, Mr. Vern, that results in Quinn unfairly receiving detention. During detention, Quinn bonds with a social circle consisting of friends Janet, Ronnie, Tucker, Matt, and Cole Hill, the latter of whom Quinn takes a romantic interest in.

Quinn asks the five friends about the upcoming 100th Annual Founders Day Parade she sees enthusiastically advertised throughout town. Identified as the son of Mayor Arthur Hill, Cole explains how the town rose to prominence thanks to his great-grandfather inventing Baypen Corn Syrup. Cole adds that the parade celebrates Baypen’s beloved clown mascot Frendo. The friends then show Quinn how they parody Frendo as a serial killer in viral videos they regularly record for social media.

Quinn and her father Glenn go to a diner where they are waited on by older server Trudy, who glares at Quinn disapprovingly. Sheriff George Dunne introduces himself to Glenn by mentioning how some folks in town have been hurting since a factory recently burned down. When the sheriff invites himself to sit down, Quinn excuses herself to join her new friends outside.

Janet, Ronnie, Tucker, Matt, Cole, and Quinn play a prank on store clerk Otis in order to acquire alcohol. Drinking around a bonfire afterward, Quinn asks about the factory burning down. The friends admit they filmed one of their videos inside the factory, but insist they had nothing to do with starting a fire, even though adults in town believe they are responsible. The group also pranks Quinn by having Tucker dress as Frendo and making it look like he killed Matt for a reaction video.

Quinn and Cole privately bond by sharing how she recently lost her mother to a drug overdose and how Cole’s younger sister also died tragically. Upon driving her home, Cole and Quinn begin kissing until Quinn’s father interrupts. Upset that they were out late and drinking, Glenn forbids Cole from seeing his daughter again, sparking an argument where Quinn accuses her father of running away to Kettle Springs because things got tough after her mother died.

When Quinn watches the clown video recorded earlier, she notices a second clown stalking in the background. Meanwhile, a clown sneaks into Tucker’s house and kills him.

Mayor Arthur Hill welcomes residents to the annual parade. During the festivities, a masked prankster inadvertently starts a fire that causes a massive Frendo float to topple toward panicking locals. As a consequence, Sheriff Dunne puts Quinn, Janet, Ronnie, and Cole in jail. Elsewhere, a clown decapitates Matt while he lifts weights in his garage.

After the sheriff releases her, Glenn grounds his daughter for getting detention as well as arrested. Quinn tries arguing that the adults in town harbor suspicious animosity toward teens.

Cole convinces Quinn to sneak out of her house to join him at the annual barn party. On their way, the couple has an odd encounter with Rust that indicates he and Cole had an unspecified rift in their former friendship.

During the barn party, Quinn and Cole sneak away for an intimate moment. However, the mood breaks when Cole repeatedly insists that Quinn slow down.

Hurt and confused, Quinn rejoins Janet and Ronnie, who advise Quinn that Cole is known for rejecting everyone. Janet’s continued teasing about it sparks a shoving match with Quinn.

Quinn and Janet’s fight breaks up when a girl named Ginger stumbles out of the cornfield and falls over dead. Matt’s decapitated head is then thrown in front of her. Janet and Ronnie assume someone is pulling another prank until a clown emerges from the corn stalks and begins firing crossbow arrows into panicking partygoers.

Rust rescues the girls by shooting the clown. However, multiple people dressed as Frendo emerge from the cornfield armed with various weapons to continue causing chaos. Cole rejoins everyone as he, Rust, Quinn, Janet, and Ronnie hide together.

While barricaded in a small building, Cole and Rust argue about their past. Quinn, Janet, and Ronnie realize Cole always rejects girls because he questions his sexual identity, and he and Rust used to have a mutual romantic interest in each other.

Glenn discovers his daughter sneaked out. While driving around town searching for her, Glenn notices someone broke into his medical office. Upon investigating, Glenn is captured by a clown who threatens to kill Quinn unless the doctor operates on another clown whose hand was blown off by Rust back at the barn.

Rust disappears after rigging an explosion that injures the clowns who surrounded the hiding spot. Quinn, Cole, Janet, and Ronnie use the opening to escape to a nearby road where they run into Sheriff Dunne. Refusing to listen to their claims of killer clowns, the sheriff arrests Cole and drives away.

Clowns chase Quinn, Janet, and Ronnie back through the cornfield. One clown kills Ronnie with a chainsaw.

Quinn and Janet escape to a nearby house where a collection of photos and newspaper clippings reveals a long history of locals targeting supposedly troublesome groups like them for murder. Quinn and Janet realize they walked into a trap just before a clown impales Janet with a pitchfork. Quinn uses the same pitchfork to kill the clown, but she ends up captured.

At his medical office, Glenn stabs the clown holding him hostage in his neck to kill him. From a walkie-talkie the clowns use to communicate, Glenn learns his captive daughter is being taken to the burned-down factory.

At the factory, four clowns are unmasked as Sheriff Dunne, Mr. Vern, store clerk Otis, and waitress Trudy, with Cole’s father Mayor Arthur Hill as their ringleader. In response to Quinn’s question about why the town is killing teens, Arthur claims it became a tradition. He explains that Kettle Springs once thrived on its corn syrup business, but decade after decade, successive waves of hobos, hippies, burnouts, and then millennials became a blight on their prosperity.

Revealing that his son Cole is also held captive with a noose around his neck, Arthur blames his son for the death of Cole’s sister. Cole angrily counters that adults have been unfairly targeting teens instead of taking accountability themselves.

Sheriff Dunne prepares to shoot Quinn when her father suddenly drives through a wall, causing distracting destruction. A collapsing beam smashes Otis’s head. Trudy is impaled and dies. Quinn soon kills the sheriff by shoving an electrified cattle prod down his throat.

Cole realizes his father burned down the factory to collect the insurance money. Leaving his son to be strangled by the noose, Arthur escapes in Glenn’s vehicle. Rust arrives in time to rescue Cole. Cole and Rust kiss.

Using a Baypen company car, Quinn, Glenn, Cole, and Rust prepare to leave when they are confronted by Mr. Vern. Quinn drives forward at full speed to blast apart Mr. Vern’s body.

In the aftermath, Glenn campaigns to become the town’s new mayor. Presenting her with a self-defense baton as a gift, Cole and Rust come to the house as a couple to say farewell to Quinn. After saying her goodbyes, Quinn drives out of Kettle Springs.

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Review:

“Clown in a Cornfield” contains a couple of gags meant to elicit quick snickers, like a trio of girls having a collective “aha!” moment when they finally realize why their common crush always rejects them, or a bit where two of those same young women cover each other’s mouths while hiding before a killer clown joins in to cover the third. These little giggles are few and far between though, so there’s never an overwhelming sense that the movie is aware of how cliched everything is. With a title combining two of the most familiar frights imaginable, you might think “Clown in a Cornfield” intends to cleverly parody typical horror tropes. Instead, it unironically employs done-to-death beats, scenes, and characterizations to make what amounts to a routine slasher in need of a livelier personality.

I don’t know enough actual teenagers to say that Quinn Maybrook accurately represents a real one. I have, however, seen her stereotype in more than enough movies to know she represents what screenwriters seem to think they’re like.

As a slight change of pace, Quinn wears headphones around her neck rather than on her ears, so she can actually engage with her widowed father Glenn on her reluctant journey out of the big city and into Kettle Springs, Missouri, where Glenn is setting up shop as the town’s new doctor following his wife’s tragic death. Aside from her persistent pout, we know Quinn pines for her deceased parent from the prominent placement of a picture in a photo collage, which the camera slowly zooms into in case you somehow missed the conspicuous clue.

In a move that usually only happens in haunted house thrillers, Quinn and Glenn arrive in Kettle Springs having never seen their new home before, allowing the camera to capture an establishing shot of father and daughter staring up at the rundown house for the first time. They aren’t even through the front door for ten seconds when the next thing Quinn does is pull out her phone so she can specifically say, “There’s no cell service.” If you start rolling your eyes now, you’re liable to pull a face muscle before the second act. The people of “Clown in a Cornfield” regularly speak in exposition, such as Quinn reminding her father, “Dad, I’m 17 years old,” her new friend summarizing his family’s status with, “My great-grandfather invented Baypen corn syrup like a hundred years ago,” and the sheriff adding a bit of recent history by recounting, “Folks around here have been hurtin’ ever since that factory burned down.”

With apparently no better way to chum the water with a red herring, the first folksy local Quinn meets is odd loner Rust, who simply shows up on her doorstep to walk her to school despite not having an invitation. At Kettle Springs High, unexpected detention creates some “Breakfast Club” bonding between Quinn and prissy blonde Janet, nondescript Ronnie, jokester Tucker, letterman-jacketed jock Matt, and the mayor’s son Cole, forming an ethnically diverse social circle pulled right out of an old Benetton ad.

The group gets up to the expected antics of drinking around a bonfire, pulling pranks, and scamming to get booze from a liquor store, although they’re shown leaving money on the counter, so we’re supposed to think, “Oh, they’re not all bad.” Eventually, they get up to dying when killer clowns emerge from you-know-where to embark on a slaughter spree that suspiciously seems to only target teens.

It's lazy, especially nowadays, to criticize a movie as seeming as though it were created by A.I., but “Clown in a Cornfield” would have a hard time pointing that finger in a different direction. Although “Clown in a Cornfield” is based on the same-named novel by Adam Cesare, it appears equally based on seen-before scripts from numerous fright films whose echoes ring loudly all throughout the movie.

When the teens need final blanks filled in, they serendipitously stumble upon a collection of newspaper clippings, then get a revelatory speech from a villain about his meager motivations for murder. Every other cutaway to a new setup comes with a loud, four-second needle drop from undiscovered and never-to-be-discovered bands. A couple of kills are suitably gruesome, though hollow horror isn’t as much of an issue as the tepid tone. The film feels like its pieces were picked from a big basket of pre-existing content, exactly how an artificial algorithm would probably churn out an average chiller if it didn’t have authentic imagination overseeing its output, which seems to be the case here.

Review Score: 45

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