Take a trip to clown-town this Halloween: 'Help, I'm a frickin clown!' ('CLOWN', 2014)

In the loin of Cloine

Eli Roth presents an intimate trip to coulrophobia-ville in the wackiest of fashions - fashion being the key word in that an accursed clown costume morphs its host into the parabolic Nordic demon 'Cloine', renown for chowing down on a child-per-period of a wintry season. It's ingredients: a classically Cronenbergian concept come carnivalesque, add two stock cubes of 'An American Werewolf in London", the "Insidious" voracity of King's Pennywise in 'It', combined with a foolhardy idea from the second series of 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Halloween' (a conjectural plucking from the 'Whedonverse"), whereby characters meld with the attributes of their stereotypical trick or treating attire subject to some eerie, nineties voodoo-hoodoo. Voila, pastiche ala peckish, peccable, polar-paediatric Dummo the 'Clown'. This lacing of intertextuality and emulation might sound a sleight of hypocritical, yet it actually works in the films favour in creating a spicy referential humour to a narrative that was - without a doubt - never going to work otherwise. It is, after all, about a man's absurdly ill-fated transmogrification into a demonic clown.

Embarking en-route to a subtle humour to partner such an imaginatively offbeat yet lucrative body-horror hypothesis, 'Clown' relegates gesticulative puns to a minimum by abstracting normative routines and functions in insinuating a farcical (though realistically pragmatic) depiction of 'clownification'. Simple tasks such as having a shower, going on a school run or going to work in clown attire are worked into the feature to provide an outlet to snicker at the audacity of the concept itself, and acts as a realisation made by the filmmakers that humour is a welcome prerequisite to accompany such preposterous notion. Watching our clown-contaminated protagonist tackle his stuck-fast red nose, reappearing make-up and transmuting wig (to actual perms of hair) boils up a recoiling deadpan comedy none the more summated by Dummo's botched suicide attempts in forestalling the cometh of the cacodemon. Rambunctious chuckles in cahoots to a grimace, the rainbow coloured blood spatter that proceeds a gunshot through the mouth - and a trip to the local hardware store to build a self-decapitation machine - is indicative of a harmonious equilibrium made between horror and humour.

Entrenched from the off to progress with the plot rather than loitering a slow-burning build for character development, perhaps the narrative rushes into causal linearity too quickly as most of the protagonist's brood are rendered depthlessly lean and subsidiary (or less) to the macro and could have helped in filling a few plot potholes. Nevertheless, the barmy 'Clown' posits an original concept within a parodic wrapper and entertains throughout - even if it is a tad 'The Fly' off the wall.