Apocalypse Clown

There’s usually very little grey area with clowns: it tend to be love or hate them. And there’s various reasons not just that they are inherently creepy, but some people have a legitimate fear others just don’t find them funny.

Jenny Malone (Amy Du Bhrún) has good reason to dislike them, her journalistic career has taken her to the heights of covering a clown funeral in a rural town in Ireland, and her one-off fling with Bobo (David Earl) has left him infatuated with her, and the laughingstock of the newsroom, and he’ll be attending.

And the gathering at the funeral is a motley collection of has-beens looking to relaunch their career The Great Alphonso (Ivan Kaye), a devoted student of the deceased clown teacher Jean DuCocque (Barry McGovern) Pepe (Fion Foley), and the demented street clown Funzo (Natalie Palamides).

A drunken night forces them to spend the night in the town only to find the next morning that there’s no sign of life and no power. A solar flare is the suspected, a cause that wets Jenny’s appetite for a story. Only problem is that the only vehicle available is Bob’s wind-up car. With the four crammed in, and DuCocque’s body strapped to the roof, it’s a cross Ireland quest to get to the bottom of the problem. Problem is each of the passengers has their own motives.

Directed by George Kane, and written by Shane O’Brien, James Walmsley and Demian Fox this is absurdist escapist nonsense that runs on serial gags and a number of set pieces. But there’s element of observation here too with the not entirely unbelievable rivalry between clowns and standing statues for performance spots in public places which provides a running gag.

There’s also a clown hierarchy with The Great Alphonso trying to get back on TV and using the solar flare and a conspiracy theorist’s equipment to achieve that. While Funzo is the lowest being little more than a ‘street clown’ that has gone towards the ‘Pennywise’ side, and Bobo is on his uppers not even able to keep a job as a hospital clown.

It’s a low budget bizarre road and quest movie that barely stops for breath with ideas added to the story that aren’t left dangling. So while this is anarchic to the eye and at times very funny, I’d bet that this was tightly controlled by Kane which doesn’t make a jot of difference because the result it damn good fun.

Apocalypse Clown will be released in cinemas across the UK and Ireland on 1 September 2023