Quinn Maybrook and her dad had just moved from Brooklyn to Kettle Springs.
And being in the-middle-of-nowhere Missouri was certainly not where Quinn wanted to land. But after her mom died from an overdose the year before, and her dad nearly had a nervous breakdown, she was willing to flex a little.
Besides, her dad is a doctor, and this little town is in desperate need of one. So maybe it’ll provide something meaningful to immerse himself in. Quinn figures she can at least survive through her senior year here and head off to college, no matter how lame the place may be.
It’ll also give Quinn a chance to make sure her dad is actually doing OK. He’s one of those hapless sorts who needs a little help.
Anyway, Quinn settles in with a group of teens she meets the first day at school. They’re definitely not the hicks she expected they’d be. In fact, they’ve got quite an online following. This group creates and posts horror spoofs centered around a local clown figure.
The Baypen Clown was the mascot for a now-defunct corn syrup company—and you still see his picture and figures all over the place. And her new friends dress up like that clown and scare passersby with fake, bloody “murders.” Then they post the screaming results to their 65,000 eager online fans.
Of course, those vids have the locals grumbling and the town sheriff always watching. And within two days, Quinn finds herself getting detention and even being held at the local jail just for being in the general vicinity of these teens and their ever-recording phones. But it’s better than just sitting around staring at swaying corn stalks.
For that matter, Quinn has her eye on one of the cute guys in the group. And they regularly find ways to finagle some booze and beer. So, her senior year might be almost decent.
Those senior year plans take an odd twist, however, when Quinn spots something strange in her friends’ latest post. As their clown leaps out from cover swinging a bloody scythe, Quinn notices another smiling face looking on from the cornstalks behind him.
In fact, as she stopped the video and looked closer, Quinn realized it was another Baypen Clown. It looked exactly like theirs. Only … creepier.
Soon after, the real murders begin.
Quinn and her dad, Dr. Maybrook, love one another deeply, even though she rebels against his parental authority on several occasions. And Dr. Maybrook not only makes efforts to reach out to his daughter, he puts his life in danger to rescue her. You could also say that Quinn and some of the other teens stand up to attackers in an attempt to save their friends.
Someone cries out, “I swear to God!”
We see several teen couples making out. A beauty queen displays a bit of cleavage. Quinn starts making out with a guy and begins unbuttoning his pants before he stops her.
We later find out the guy is gay, but he refuses to accept that he’s same-sex attracted. Eventually he and his male lover make out passionately. Later, Quinn embraces and encourages them.
Two friends stage a fake fight over the supposed fact that one of them got the other’s grandmother pregnant. A guy and girl walk into a cornfield where she strips off her shirt, leaving her dressed in jeans and a bra.
Clown in a Cornfield is obviously a slasher pic. Accordingly, viewers get hit with a firehose blast of staged death-dealing.
For example, a teen has a saw blade pushed down on his neck while lifting weights, decapitating him. Someone is stabbed in the neck with a huge knife. He then pulls it out to gushing effect and bleeds out on the floor. A clown with a chainsaw rips through several teens’ midsections and then proceeds to hack off limbs before the camera cuts away. Someone gets shot in the stomach with a shotgun. Quinn’s dad then tries to help, by picking buckshot out of the gaping wound.
Shotgun blasts rip into other people’s body parts and obliterate a man’s hand. Fiery explosions leave victims writhing on the ground. Several people are impaled by a pitchfork, some of whom are hoisted up and suspended in the air. A teen is strung up by the neck and struggles, on tippy toes, to keep himself alive. People are zapped by an electric shock cattle prod, and a man is electrocuted as that prod is forcefully jammed down his throat.
Impaled individuals gush and spit blood all over others. Several throats are slashed. A teen’s decapitated head is thought, at first, to be a plaster casting. But then it spatters gore all over a young woman’s face and upper body as someone throws it to her. We hear of people dying in a horrible fire. A young woman gets hit in the back with a crossbow bolt. She screams, struggles forward and falls face-first to the ground.
A car hits an individual with such force that the victim splatters across the windshield like a gore-filled balloon.
Clown in a Cornfield’s script is riddled with more than 40 f-words and about 15 s-words, along with a handful of uses each of “h—,” “d–n,” “a–hole,” “bulls–t,” “and “d-ck.” Jesus’ and God’s names are both abused a total of nine times (four of those misuses combine God with “d–n” and one blends Jesus’ name with an f-word).
We hear that Quinn’s mother died from a drug overdose the year before. But Quinn still readily joins parties where scores of teens drink shots of booze and cans of beer. (We see several gatherings of drinking and drunken teens.) When confronted by Quinn’s dad, a teen guy tells him that, “Realistically, everybody drinks in high school.”
A guy holds up a joint. Several teens smoke on a couple occasions.
When Quinn and her dad move into their new home, they’re hit by the smell of a dead, rotting animal that they find stuck in their chimney. Quinn disobeys her dad several times, including sneaking out after being grounded and hanging out with teens he instructed her to avoid.
A group of townspeople declare that over the years, they’ve had to defend their small community from various threats, including groups of destructive vagrants and hippies. But they think the worst group is the social media generation.
Quinn declares to a gathering of adults that, “The world’s gonna change, whether you like it or not. … You’d rather kill us than just listen!” (Which is arguably the Gen Z message of this movie.)
Back in the ‘80s, cheesy teen slasher movies often served as gory, oddly moralistic commentaries about our society at large. Between salacious slayings of foolish teens, these films addressed topics such as adolescent promiscuity; drinking and drugs; the generation gap; our American society’s moral decay; and the class and cultural upheavals of that time.
Clown in a Cornfield sports a similar style, but with a Gen Z twist.
Here, the teen protagonist—who’s been transplanted from the East Coast to Fly-Over Country, U.S.A.—is the cool type. She’s smarter than adults. Her language is foul and flinty. She quickly supports her fellow teens’ gay sexuality. She embraces the idea that phrases like “tradition” and “small-town pride” can be archaic and potentially evil. And her movie makes it clear that survival demands we look forward, never behind.
However, despite all that “Gen Z savvy,” most of the teens here are barely on screen long enough to facilitate needing to remember their names. They, and many foolish adults—because, after all, there are so many more of them—are butchered in blood-gushing ways.
It’s all so meta and at the same time gruesomely nasty.
I might suggest that a few hours spent with a clown in an actual small-town cornfield might be more entertaining. And, for that matter, better for your mental health.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
