“Clown” is a movie that began life as a fake trailer on the internet. It purported to have the involvement of Eli Roth (“Hostel”, “Cabin Fever”). The trailer eventually caught the attention of Roth, who loved it and helped to produce this actual movie inspired by the trailer. This is a movie with some scary ideas in it but ultimately, just isn’t as entertaining as it could be.

A kid’s birthday party looks like it’s going to be ruined when the party clown doesn’t show up. Fortunately, the boy’s father, Kent (Andy Powers “In Her Shoes”), manages to find a clown costume to entertain the children. When he tries to remove the suit, it just will not come off. He soon learns that this is no costume, this is the skin of a demon.

The characters in “Clown” are disappointing. Kent is just not an interesting character and the performance from Andy Powers is pretty lame. By far the best performance in the whole movie comes from Peter Stormare (“Fargo”, “The Big Lebowski”) as a man that once suffered from the same curse. Stormare works well with the material. I was disappointed by the look of the demon. It doesn’t look enough like a clown or interesting enough in its own right. I think Pennywise looks better in both mini-series and films of “It”.

There are some disturbing sequences and concepts here and I think overall, it’s much scarier than “It”. That being said, I think a lot of “Clown” is quite underwhelming. The film also feels needlessly long considering how little actually happens. If you are somebody that is easily scared, you will probably be quite shocked at some of the moments in this film because they can be rather unsettling. By the end of it, I just didn’t feel it reached the level it should have done.