Clown Footage (2018)

“Director”: Manny Velazquez

Viewed on Amazon Prime

 

Summary: Two people get together to film a reality TV pilot and they get murdered by clowns. It is less exciting than it sounds.

 

I will be perfectly upfront, this movie is really really really bad. This isn’t a ‘review’ in the “should I recommend Clown Footage to you” way, but more in the “we are doing a post mortem on Clown Footage to see how it failed so horribly and if there is anything they could do to improve it” way. This might be a good example for this because Clown Footage very well may be the worst found footage movie I have ever seen. I’m ready to declare it the worst found footage movie ever made but I can’t do that yet because I haven’t watched all of Manny Velazquez’s oeuvre. I mainly picked this one because I assumed it was going to be either a ripoff of IT or it would be playing off that killer clown sightings thing that used to pop up. I was so wrong on both counts. So, apart from the movie not taking advantage of the obvious pun and having the name be Clown’d Footage, what went wrong?

So what is the story for Clown Footage? A box is dropped off at a police station and the hour of the movie is the only parts of that footage that were released to the public. Of course, I had to assume the SD cards were in the box because this is the first thing we are shown.

 

Oh boy. If the first thing we see has a typo, then what are the odds that the rest of the movie was made with care? Also, as a side note, who dropped these off? The ultra specific time of 12:34 PM (make a wish!) states that they know exactly when they showed up. Did they see this person? Was it a clown? Anyway, this is just the worthless frame story that never comes up, the real story is about a guy, Andy, who was hired by Stafan, an ex-child star who is trying to get back in the limelight, to film his new reality TV series pilot at his…apartment building complex(?). They putter around for a bit while waiting for the other actors to show up and then they get murdered by clown(s). That is the entire plot. Now,even this could be interesting, if say, Stafan’s or Andy’s character were explored or if the setting were atmospheric or even if the clowns were visually interesting or had some fun backstory. None of these happen. But let’s start with the setting.

Does this shot look interesting? I hope you said yes because we spend a solid EIGHT MINUTES on this exact shot. There is about 60 minutes of footage (and we’ll deal with that in more detail in a sec) so that means a full 13% of the entire movie happens at this gate. I don’t think I have to explain why that is a terrible idea. But hey, maybe their conversation in front of this gate is interesting! Oh, it’s about how Stafan was a ‘child star’ by being a background character in movies. And then they make jokes about how his career never took off because he wasn’t molested. Very tasteful.

 

So where else is this set? We got…alleys around the apartments…

….and the apartment Stafan lives in, specifically his bedroom…

….and…that about sums it up. Those are all the locations we see, except for this basement looking place that we cut to once that never gets brought up again or explained.

I assume this is where the clown lives. So the setting is utterly bland and probably just where one of the two people in the movie lives in real life. There isn’t anything really wrong with using whatever you have at your disposal to make a movie but, you have to try and DO something with it, not just show it as is and assume we’ll make it scary in our heads.

 

So we have the plot and we have the setting, but what is supposed to be scary? Well…..this:

That is our monster. It is shown fully on screen at the Seven minute Fifty four second mark. It’s kind of an issue when the “scary” monster is 1) Not scary 2) Obviously just a mask and wig purchased from a cheap costume shop and 3) Shown in full view in clear lighting when there is still an hour left in the movie. If you came here to see a scary killer clown well, at least they show it to you early so you can just stop watching before the ten minute mark. The clown does nothing really scary for the entire rest of the movie, even as they try to play it as a creepy murder clown. I will admit that murder clowns can be scary but it is difficult to find them frightening when they use visibly fake knives, as shown:

and can’t even defeat a guy in a fistfight when they have the element of surprise.

+

After all of that there may still be one question you have, what actually happens in this movie? The answer is not very much. Andy and Stafan first meet when Stafan picks up Andy to drive him to his apartment complex to talk about this reality show he is planning. They only talk about this show in the vaguest terms possible, so these discussion add up to precisely nothing. This could be an interesting character moment about how Stafan is desperate to get back in the industry and that is kind of what happens, but the acting is so poor that I have no idea if that is the idea they are going with. After picking him up and driving to the apartment (where we have to parallel park, TWICE, because Stafan didn’t like the first spot) they just have this eight minute discussion outside the gate about the same non-topics. Then after spending all this time outside they go in and see the only good thing in the movie, Stafan’s cat, which is an adorable tuxedo kitten. And no, I’m not showing you a picture of the cat. I earned the right to look at this cat by watching this piece of garbage. If you want to see the cat then you can watch the movie. They walk around the apartment briefly and then walk around the alleys around the apartment. Nothing interesting happens. Something finally happens when Stafan uses the bathroom and Andy is left alone in the kitchen. While Andy is alone he is attacked by a crazed clown. After Stafan leaves the bathroom and finds Andy missing, but his camera still there, Stafan assumes Andy just left and films himself for a while. Occasionally the Clown appears in the background of these shots.

Like so. Stafan goes back to his bedroom where he is attacked by the clown. After several fistfights where Stafan easily subdues the clown he is eventually defeated by his jaunty foe. He isn’t immediately killed though. First he must be tied up and placed on the ground so that his succulent and juicy backside is perfectly centered in frame.

Then he gets murdered. Because thank god the movie is over…..OR IS IT? This murder happens at the 66 minute mark, which brings up the last question of this movie, how in the hell did it get to 70 minutes when NOTHING happens in the whole movie? The answer is pretty simple my friend, transparent editing tricks.

 

The intro for this movie is a perfectly timed five full minutes where nothing plot related happens. Hell, nothing visually interesting happens, though the director thought this swing set was interesting.

He thought it was so interesting that we had to see it in different lighting.

So interesting we had to see it from a different camera angle!

AND ANOTHER!

A full MINUTE AND A HALF IS THIS SWINGSET THAT NEVER COMES UP AGAIN.

But that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the time stretching measures!

The first thing that even starts the plot is this title card

The movie starts in earnest with a five minute segment showing Stafan alone in his apartment with his cameraguy no longer around. He wanders around and then a clown appears in his bedroom. Then this title card appears!

So I thought initially this sequence was going to be either a prologue or the end of the movie, and then at the end I would have to piece together what happened. Both of those were wrong though, because those five minutes of footage at the beginning are IN the next forty minutes of footage that follows! They are just repeated in a desperate attempt to try and lengthen the movie!

 

But it still doesn’t succeed! The last four minutes are just the opening title cards repeated with the last minute and a half of footage, the minute that brings us from 69 minutes to 70 minutes, is just STATIC.

THIS IS THE SEVENTIETH MINUTE, FOLKS. I wish I was kidding.

 

What does this leave us with? Well, it leaves me with a healthy respect for people who make bad movies. Everyone who has made a movie that I have negatively reviewed, I apologize to you. Because no matter how bad the things you made were, they at least were original content that you had to do some work to make. An Easter Bunny Puppy has more integrity than this and you have no idea how hard that sentence was to type. And I’m not just mocking an easy target, if they had just uploaded the forty minutes of original content they filmed as the short film ‘Clown Footage’ I wouldn’t be writing this. I am only talking about this because that runtime is just there to trick you into watching it and I can not excuse trickery. Unfortunately, this director has a bunch of other things on Amazon Prime. I think I know what I am torturing myself with next.

 

 

 

I do not own any of the images used here.  All images used belong to their respective copyright holders and are used under the Fair Use doctrine.