YMMV / Killer Klowns from Outer Space

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • The two female Klowns just leave the Terenzi Brothers covered in kisses instead of killing them. Were they trying to rape the men so they could become pregnant and produce more Klowns, or were they just really horny?
  • What if the Terenzis managed to escape the female Klowns by killing them? Dave did inform them of the Klowns' weak spot before they were taken away.
• Awesome Moments:
  • Dave bravely taking on Jumbo, and in doing so, finds the Klowns weakness.
  • Dave passing up the chance to escape to take out Klownzilla and killing him with his badge.
  • Debbie is a resourceful Damsel out of Distress towards those hideously horrifying popcorn Klown hatchlings attacking her in the bathroom.
• Awesome Music:
  • The title theme by The Dickies.
  "Killer Klow-wow-wow-whooHOO! From Outer Space~!"
  • The Klowns' March music. Composer John Massari later made a new expanded version! The updated version that serves as the video game's main theme, "The Darkkest Karnival", remains impressive.
  • The collection machine theme, a.k.a. "Tanks rolling into Poland", has the perfect "Well, we're fucked" vibe to it.
  • "Escape the Klown Cathedral", which plays during The Chase of the climax has absolutely no business being as adventurous, panicking, suspenseful and creepy as it is, even listening it on its own it's a great piece of music that clearly tells a story with its slower parts and raising crescendo.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Many people remember the scene with the female Klowns. Most however were rather turned off by it.
• Cult Classic: While it wasn't a huge moneymaker at the box office, the film has a devoted fanbase who love it for its bizarre yet strangely endearing premise of humans fighting Monster Clowns from outer space.
• Evil Is Cool: Freakish and diabolical they may be, the titular Klowns are widely praised by audiences due to their gruesome and bizarre appearances and personalities.
• Fetish Retardant: At one point the Terenzi brothers find themselves in a ball pit on the alien ship and are accosted by two female klowns with expanding boobs. However, while poking fun at the Boldly Coming trope (when the brothers return, they are covered in kisses), the female klowns are depicted using the same unsettling human-but-not-quite prosthetics as the male klowns, and of course, clown make-up which distorts their features even further.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The concept involving a bunch of random Klowns going around town killing people seems like a terrifyingly goofy idea for a film. However, it's less goofy and just straight-up terrifying now after the 2016 clown sightings.
• He's Just Hiding: Word of God confirms that several Klowns actually survived the explosion of their ship, suggesting that the fan-favorites may show up again if a continuation will ever come along.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The name of the Burger Fool joint in the film? BIGTOP BURGER. Creator Ian "Worthikids" Worthington has sworn◊ that it was coincidental since he didn't watch Killer Klowns from Outer Space before releasing his animation.
• Inferred Holocaust: It's never spelled out just how many people were killed by the Klowns, but they were scooping people up all over town (to the point that they needed a giant vacuum cleaner for the job) and there were a lot of cotton candy cocoons in the tent ship. The number's probably in the hundreds, and Mike thinks the Klowns captured the whole town. The movie ends on a lighthearted Pie in the Face gag, however.
• Moral Event Horizon: One of the Klowns, Jumbo luring a child in an attempt to bash her skull in with a mallet, luckily her mother stops her because the girl hadn't finished her meal. Made worse because that clown pretended to be friendly even by the Klown's standards in order to lure her.
• Music to Invade Poland to: The collection machine scene, by admission of the composer.
• Narm Charm: The entire point of the film! The movie is an Eighties-fused take on 50s B-Movies with a campy premise, lots of laughs, and horror. It's why the film has cultivated a loyal and dedicated cult following.
• One-Scene Wonder: John Vernon (Sgt. Mooney) has a grand total of seven minutes of screen time. He gets an "And Starring" credit. Then again, he was pretty much the only big name in the cast.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Deputy Dave is played by John Allen Nelson, who would go on to play John D. Cort on Baywatch.
  • That one guy who is seen buying beer and mocking Mooney during the opening credits? He’s played by Christopher Titus in one of his few film roles.
• Rooting for the Empire: The Klowns might be quite evil, but given that the humans in this film are quite boring, and their tactics are quite unorthodox, you can’t help but root for them as they take humans out left and right.
• The Scrappy: While most of the human cast is pretty unremarkable at best, even Mooney, most who watch the film tend to hold a particular apathy for the Terenzi Brothers, finding them unfunny at best and annoying distractions at worst. Some go as far as to say that they would've preferred it had the Terenzis bought it when Klownzilla threw the ice cream truck or when the ship exploded.
• Signature Scene: Plenty, it's considered a Cult Classic for having many memorable scenes, some stands-outs include...
  • Slim snatching up a whole group of people with his Impossible Shadow Puppets.
  • Shorty confronting and killing the bully biker after his iconic Tempting Fate line: "What are you gonna do, knock my block off?!"
  • The Klowns visiting a young woman with a stack of pizza boxes only for Shorty to pop out and web her up.
  • The Car Chase with Slim riding on an invisible car, which was the Chiodo Brothers' starting idea before it snowballed into becoming this movie.
  • Jumbo charming and luring a little girl out of the fast food, due to it being a genuinely unnerving scene.
• So Bad, It's Good: Notably averted. The movie is often mistaken for this because of its premise, but it's actually an intentionally funny movie with an imaginative set design and monster effects.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • In a meta sense- The car that fell the way it did in the chase scene wasn't supposed to do that but instead fall all the way down. However, the crew forgot to remove the stoppers.
  • In a less meta sense. Debbie's arm disappears into a matte painting, Mike almost trips on top of the Terenzi brothers^note who were supposed to be down a trap door at this point, and a zipper can be seen on the back of a Klown's head at one point. Some of the optical effects, like the shadow puppet, are also suspect.
  • One scene was scrapped due to this. During the chase inside the spaceship, one obstacle was to be a tightrope that then turned into some stairs. The angle and the lighting had to be very strict so you could only see the painted rope on the platform the actors were walking across, and the actors themselves, but the latter weren't properly lit and they decided to leave the scene out.
  • Also, during a scene featuring Farmer Green, you can actually see the prop master inside his shack.
• Spiritual Adaptation: The slapstick-inspired kills of the Klowns make this movie the closest thing to a more faithful adaptation of The Mask comic.
• Strawman Has a Point: While he takes his denial to comical extremes, Officer Mooney isn't wrong that Mike's affiliation with known troublemakers, the Terenzi brothers, make his already dubious claims more suspect.
• Too Cool to Live: The same traits that make Mooney the most hilarious character (namely, his over-the-top profanities) also mark him as doomed to anyone familiar with this type of movie.
• Ugly Cute: Some fans might consider the Klowns as this, especially Shorty.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The '80s Hair on the cast and complete lack of any kind of cell phones (which would probably break a couple of plot points) - not to mention the soundtrack - immediately point to this film being an '80s piece.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • Despite the aforementioned errors, the Klown effects aren't half bad for the film's low $2 million budget.
  • The shadow puppet scene looks a lot simpler than it was. Instead of hand-drawn animation for the shadows, the shadows were created for real by filming the shadows of stop-motion animated shapes designed for the scene. However, they also cast the shadows onto a scale model of the scene, which allowed them to behave naturally when going across the textured wall and surfaces. Then they took that footage of the shadows on the model and composited it into the scene, and it looks like one of the simplest effects in the movie.

---