Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-Review by Professor Popinjay

I saw this on tv when I was a kid. I couldn’t sleep for like ten minutes! Okay, I wasn’t accustomed to horror back then and it did affect me a bit. I couldn’t put a towel in the towel hamper for quite some time without fear I might be attacked by chuckling clown snakes.

I’m still not into horror per sé but in adulthood I’ve grown to love monster movies which I would not classify as horror really. Yes, there might be some horror elements but monster flicks are usually very different from slasher flicks which I abhor.

The tagline for Killer Klowns from Outer Space parodied the tagline from Alien “In Space No One Can Hear You Scream.” Killer Klowns tagline was “In Space No One Can Eat Ice Cream.”

That’s not scary. That’s hilarious. I love it. My kid brain couldn’t see the hilarity of this film as I watched with morbid curiosity. After watching again in adulthood I get it finally. I want to show it to my older kids. They love Five Nights at Freddy’s and semi scary crap like that.

Yeah, this does have some horror elements, even more so than FNAF, but it’s never anything that makes me want to wretch and not sleep for days. Seeing it again was good therapy really. I faced childhood fears and found them to be un-based and silly. Seeing this again made me laugh at much that was meant to be scary and frankly most of it was supposed to be funny.

This is full of classic horror tropes. The young lovers at Make Out Point. The cop who is skeptical to the very end. The “let’s split up and search” trope. Great stuff. 

I’d never seen the ending before and I almost think if I had I would have loved this film even as a kid because scary as it was to me then, the ending would have thrilled me to no end. It’s not scary, it’s cool!