“The Clown At Midnight” is a slasher film that starts off surprisingly well and has some genuinely creepy and intense moments. Unfortunately, what ruins it is the awful acting and performances as well as the decline in the writing as it progresses. If it had somehow managed to maintain itself, this could have been a great killer clown flick.

Kate (Sarah Lassez) is a teenager, who only recently learned she was adopted. Her birth mother was an actress, who was apparently murdered by her co-star in a production of “Pagliacci”. Now, Kate is helping to tidy up the old theatre where her mother was killed. It seems the killer clown may still be on the loose as Kate’s fellow students are being picked off one by one.

My biggest problem with this film is with the majority of the teens. While Sarah Lassez’s Kate is fine, the other teens are so darn annoying and the performances are just dreadful. Christopher Plummer (“The Sound Of Music”) is good as Mr. Caruthers, whose family owned the theatre. Margot Kidder (“Superman: The Movie”, “The Amityville Horror”) also has a role here. There is something kind of interesting about having the killer dressed as Pagliacci. I actually think some of the sequences with the killer are actually done very well, far better than most slasher films.

“The Clown At Midnight” definitely has its moments. I like some of the ideas, the twist at the end is somewhat predictable but it’s still done fairly well and there are some moments that are actually fairly scary. The dumb teenagers just really take you out of the experience and that’s so frustrating. Whenever they are onscreen, this drops from being a scary killer clown picture to being dud slasher below “I Know What You Did Last Summer”. It feels like two very different scripts were awkwardly mashed together, one for a psychological thriller and one for a typical slasher.