Clownhouse [1989] Victor Salva

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Clownhouse (1989)


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094886/

ENGLISH LANGUAGE FRENCH AND SPANISH SUBTITLES

Clownhouse is a 1989 horror film written and directed by Victor Salva. It was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize in the dramatic category at the 1989 Sundance film festival.

Nathan Forrest Winters ... Casey Collins
Brian McHugh ... Geoffrey Collins
Sam Rockwell ... Randy
Michael Jerome West ... Lunatic Cheezo (as Tree)
Byron Weible ... Lunatic Bippo
David C. Reinecker ... Lunatic Dippo
Timothy Enos ... Real Cheezo / Georgie
Frank Diamanti ... Real Bippo / Charlie
Karl-Heinz Teuber ... Real Dippo (as Karl Heinz Teuber)
Viletta Skillman ... Mrs. Collins - Mother
Gloria Belsky ... Fortune Teller
Tom Mottram ... Ringmaster

Clownhouse was one of the last slasher films to come out of the 1980s, a decade notable for the plethora of slasher pictures like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Prom Night, and many others.

Despite ending a decade known for intense violence and gratuitous gore, Clownhouse did not have much of either. Instead, the film followed in the tradition of John Carpenter's Halloween by limiting the onscreen carnage and focusing on lighting, sound, and suspense. The film also portrays a message concerning the fears of mankind. The final onscreen text reads:

"No man can hide from his fears; as they are a part of him, they will always know where he is hiding."

Writer/director Victor Salva spends a majority of the film setting up sardonic situations that allude to the characters and their positions. Throughout the movie, a song is frequently played or sung, in which a line reads: "Don't be afraid of the dark, sweetheart." Moments later, two of the brothers are being unknowingly chased in the night by two of the clowns.

Victor Salva's conviction for molesting the lead actor in Clownhouse is the reason for his temporary filmmaking absence between 1996 and 2001. In the 1980s Nathan Forrest Winters, the leading actor who played Casey, would press charges against Salva for sexual abuse during the making of this film, which resulted in Salva serving 15 months of a 3 year jail term. Forrest would come forward again in 1996, when Salva's film Powder was released.

Very few people other than horror completists and Sam Rockwell fans would even know Clownhouse exists today if not for the sins of its maker, writer-director Victor Salva, whose feature debut this was. When Salva's later movie Powder, made for Disney, was about to open in 1995, Clownhouse star Nathan Forrest Winters stood up and protested Disney's bankrolling of Salva's career. Reason? Because Salva, before and during the shooting of Clownhouse, had molested the then-12-year-old Winters (and videotaped it). Sentenced to three years in prison, Salva served fifteen months, completing parole in 1992.

The three brothers in the film ΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ young bed-wetting Casey (Winters), sensible middle child Geoffrey (Brian McHugh), and the aforementioned bully Randy (Rockwell) ΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ spend two-thirds of the film isolated (their parents are out for the night) and threatened by three silent, menacing men. One of them is an eye-rolling baldy who fixates on balloon animals and later tries to make one out of a human being. The other two are hulking slobberers, much like society's general mental image of child molesters. (Salva himself, seen briefly in a crowd scene at the carny, looked a bit slimmer and more presentable than he does now ΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ he seems to have morphed into one of the heavy-set evil clowns.)

In a 1999 interview, Salva said that when he was a kid devouring horror movies, he felt bad for the monster: "When someone in the movie pointed and screamed, 'Arrrrgh, he's so hideous! He's so ugly!' I thought, 'No, the monster is the most interesting thing about the movie. I wonder what he's thinking and feeling." Oddly, this never comes through in Clownhouse; we're meant to identify with young, fearful Casey, not the clown-faced murderers. Casey is more or less constantly bombarded with unwanted physical attention, from his eldest brother as well as the three psychos. Far from being the defense of pedophilia you might expect, Clownhouse plays like Salva's self-loathing mirror on himself. Clowns are weird, sometimes intimidating grown-ups entrusted with children; Salva may have been viewing himself as the evil clown preying on Casey, who, in real life, was left in Salva's care by trusting parents (who later, IΓΓé¼Γäóm sure, bitterly regretted it).

Salva refers to his sex crime as "a stupid mistake," but by "mistake" does he just mean he got caught at it? The conventional wisdom is that pedophiles are never "cured"; the obsession is part of their hard-wiring, and all that can really be done with them after they've served their time is to keep a close eye on their movements. Or, in Salva's case, their movies. But Clownhouse is also an indelible document of pain as well as sickness. There he is, poor Nathan Forrest Winters, cringing in fear in one scene after another, reliving symbolically on film what he was enduring in the dark after-hour shadows of the movie set or in Salva's home. Winters' terror is all too real, and becomes unbearably dismaying to watch. The other two boys in the film are acting; Winters isn't, quite. Am I recommending Clownhouse? In and of itself, divorced from the reality behind it, it's a serviceable thriller with some truly odd touches (the boys' mother and a fortune-teller they encounter at the carny both seem like chubby drag queens). Viewed in its real-life context, it becomes exponentially distasteful and squalid, moreso than any 42nd-street European zombie dreck that depicts the slaughter of actual animals.

Salva became noticeable again in the film industry in 2001 with the release of his sleeper hit Jeepers Creepers, followed by its 2003 sequel Jeepers Creepers II.