Can’t Sleep…Clowns Will Eat Me

Circus clowns don’t scare me. Unless they’re driving the plane, train or clown car I’m riding in. But by and large, painted faces, day-glo hair, putty noses, and even sweet ass multi-colored pajamas don’t invoke any suppressed fear within. I’m pretty well-balanced that way. But circus monkeys are a different tale. I have a deep-rooted fear of having chimpanzee poop thrown at me.

That’s another blog entirely.

But in Scary or Die, a new indie horror movie that’s just now arriving on DVD, VOD, OMG, LOL, WTF, has a flesh-eating clown in it. That’s kinda scary. It also has a vengeful Necromancer (noun 1. a method of divination through alleged communication with the dead; black art), a dirty cop (unwashed officer of the law and/or a corrupt badge wearer), Mexican zombies (Aye caramba!), and a mysterious woman and lonely man looking for love in all the wrong places (Wal-Mart™, garbage can, my apartment).

If you haven’t figured it out already, Scary or Die is (from the website) “five interwoven horror stories that take place in and around the “City of Angles.” (I think they mean Los Angeles. That, or some town loaded with clowns and… Never mind, it’s Los Angeles.)

In the segment Clowned, Corbin Bleu – the kid who once had Sideshow Bob hair and was named after salad dressing – plays a street hustler who “gets bitten by a clown at a birthday party and begins to undergo a Kafkaesque metamorphosis with horrifying consequences.” Three questions: What was a street hustler doing at a birthday party? What was a flesh-eating clown doing at a birthday party? And who, besides poop-flinging monkeys uses the term “Kafkaesque” anymore?

The skin-chomping clown in Scary or Die looks pretty cool. They might have used Pennywise from Stephen King’s It (book, 1986/TV mini-series, 1990) as a business model. Played by pop culture icon and fishnet stocking cottage industry Tim Curry (see Rocky Horror Picture Show/1975), Pennywise has nifty rotted fangs (gum disease is a horrible and yet entirely preventable condition), and causes unease for a bunch of grown-up kids over the course of 1,090 excruciatingly tedious character developed pages.

It took me a week to read Stephen King’s book. It took me 192 minutes to watch the TV mini-series. And Barnes & Noble ™ wonders why I don’t come in anymore. Hey B&N – lose the phone books and get more DVDs. And would it kill you with a flesh-eating clown to price them at $2.99 each, including new releases?

Books stores should totally hire me. Not zoos or circuses, though. All it would take is one steaming paw full lobbed in my direction…