Klown

The Incredibly Strange section of the Film Festival programme is usually a bit hit and miss, and this year it seems to be more miss than hit - the other things we've seen being The Cabin in the Woods and Sightseers. I bravely went to Klown by myself, inspired the "blisteringly funny" description. My hopes were further raised immediately beforehand by the review on the TV 3 website, which said "I have not laughed so hard while watching a movie in a very long time. In fact, a friend and I managed to sustain the giggles right through the closing credits and were still guffawing out onto the street afterwards, sides aching, tears rolling down our cheeks".

Klown has a reasonably amusing premise. Two men (Casper and Frank), who appear to be in committed relationships with very nice women, go on a "boys own" canoe and camping trip without their girlfriends. At the last minute, Frank decides he will take his girlfriend's 11 year old nephew Bo along because he wants to demonstrate his potential as a good father. Since the purpose of the trip is debauchery, you can see this isn't going to turn out well, and Casper is justifiably upset.

Anyhow, off they go and Casper tries hard to have sex as often as possible. The trio gets thrown out of a camping ground, capsize their canoe, eat a lot of pancakes, visit a music festival and a brothel and smoke pot. Casper and Frank give Bo a hard time because he has a small penis. And....that's about it. Some of Klown is funny, and some (like Mr Bean), is painful and some is in poor taste. One of the things that annoyed me is that, like lots of American comedy, one of the basic premises of the movie is that men are more stupid than women and I think that this is lazy, and inaccurate. Klown seemed like "Tool Time" or "Malcolm in the Middle" with rude bits. It's always hard to say why something does or doesn't seem funny, but I'll go on record saying I don't find men doing stupid things while women pick up the pieces intrinsically funny. Perhaps I like my comedy to be equal opportunity. I laughed a bit, but not hard and not often. Disappointing.

Anne's rating 1/5