Ok, I admit it, clowns freak me out. Like, big time. They're painted to be smiling, but to me their faces always look like masks of evil, their blood red lips, their brightly colored makeup hiding whatever they are truly feeling. For me, it's not a hard sell to believe that clowns could easily be evil. There have been quite a few movies made trying to cash in on people's fear of these supposedly happy creatures, but as much as I hate clowns, most of the movies fall flat for me. "It," probably the most famous of evil clown movies, seems tired and stale for me, and nowhere near as terrifying as I found the book (that damn book haunted my dreams for years). Other killer clown movies are either played for laughs (and you know I love "Killer Klowns from Outer Space," but it's not scary the way I want my evil clown movies to be) and a lot of them are simply too low budget to be of any use to me. It's like the filmmakers bank on the idea that an evil clown will instantly make a successful horror movie. After all, a lot of people are afraid of clowns, right? So they'll like a movie with an evil clown in it, right? Everything from "S.I.C.K." to "Dead Clowns" to "Mr. Jungles" seems to operate on the principle that a scary idea is all that is needed to make a scary movie, and while the killer clowns in these movies often look cool, that's about all I can say in praise of the dreck surrounding them.

She's going through a messy divorce, and her husband wants her out of his life in an even more permanent way. Jacky Reres, the actress who plays Lynn, is spot-on in her performance. she really carries the movie, and I believed her plight the entire time. Her skeezy husband pissed me off, and when a new, seemingly nice guy (played by Rick Ganz) came into her life I was happy (except for the nagging fear that he might be evil...in these kind of movies you never know). When murders start happening around Jacky and she starts seeing visions of an evil clown from her own paintings, I was spooked (come on, how freaky is that idea? You paint something and then it comes to life and tries to hurt you). everyone around her starts to think she's going off the deep end, and we wonder if she'll be able to defeat the evil clown before it's too late.

There's not much originality here, but the slasher formula works well so I can't complain about that. The true star of the film is the nasty, evil makeup on Shivers the Clown, and that really IS original. I've never seen a killer clown look quite like this. It seems a little slly at first that a shirtless guy with only his face made up lumbering around would actually be scary, but in the movie, the character's damaged mind makes the idea work. His scowling face is every bit as creepy in the film as it is in the painting leering from the DVD cover, so in this case, the makeup did not disappoint, but I was excited to see that the movie surrounding the killer clown was worth watching as well. Minus a few caveats that seem to come with the territory of low-budget horror, this movie is entertaining and worth a watch.

The acting in this movie, while not really bad by my standards, has a lot of clunky line delivery and some performances that leave much to be desired (witness all the cops... even the one who's a pretty good actor is way too over-the-top in his performance for me). There are some less than stellar special effects as well, and while that's to be expected in a low-budget movie, the camera doesn't need to linger on a decapitation when we know it's going to look horrendously fake. Plus the climax of the film dragged on for way too long and was in desperate need of an editor.

It's not perfect, but there are so many things that it gets right that bigger-budgeted movies get wrong. I can't help but love it for that.