Flasz On Film

Look, making any movie is an arduous endeavour, alright? It’s hard and I fully appreciate the simple fact that any film that exists deserves at least the fundamental respect for just being.

However!

Hold on, where’s my soapbox?

Sometimes, as a viewer, I feel the need to express certain views I’d normally keep to myself because why should I pour vitriol on a movie like Apocalypse Clown in the first place? I could just move on and not write anything about it. After all, this is what my mum would have advised. “If you don’t have anything nice to say, you can just keep your piehole shut” is what she would typically say; which is something I vehemently disagree with on principle because straightforward honesty underpinned by rudimentary politeness have been much better values in the long run. Nevertheless, as I got older, I began appreciating this philosophy as, at least in general terms, it seems to be geared towards maintaining a better level of inner peace.

So, the question is: do I want to maintain my inner peace? Or do I choose violence to make a point?

As someone who has cultivated a deep appreciation towards trashy cinema, I can fully get behind any movie that reaches for the stars, or attempts to do something weird and unconventional, especially if, as it is often the case, the filmmakers – rogue mavericks that they may be – might not have the means or the vision to execute on everything they set out to achieve. Not everyone can afford to cast great actors, or to splurge on great special effects. Or even to invest in recording equipment to make their movie look like a professionally assembled product, as opposed to a glorified home video. Even the script doesn’t need to be great for a resulting movie to succeed. If the passion, commitment and soul are there, something respectable will come out because the audience – so long as they venture into the movie with their hearts wide open – will be able to connect to the filmmakers’ earnest attempt to put together a movie they genuinely believed in.

It’s all a game of risk and reward. A shoddy horror movie is easier to connect with because even if the script is bad, the acting is wooden and the idea is tattered and well-worn, I have a good chance to connect with something in the movie and make the experience worthwhile. The same goes for many other genres. Except comedy.

Now, comedy is a game of high stakes poker because it must be funny to succeed. An unfunny comedy is not an experience you want to be a part of. It’s so embarrassing that any other ancillary value is rendered null and void because the viewer would rather switch the movie off or leave the cinema before trying to latch onto anything else in the film. And what makes a comedy funny, exactly?

Hard to tell. This is the magical, ineffable quality of a solid comedy where a good enough script marries committed enough performances with switched on enough direction to produce an experience that connects with the audience on a visceral level. It’s way harder to engineer it than it is to engineer a scary or a repulsive experience in the context of a horror movie. Therefore, I strongly believe that great comedies are way more difficult to put together, especially because the baseline for success is so much higher than in any other genre. But conversely, a comedy fails ever so much harder. Even a mediocre comedy will come across as bad. It’s a game of poker where the filmmakers go all in and agree to one of two outcomes: a complete and unmatched success or a devastating failure. With nothing in between.

Sadly, Apocalypse Clown is not a success. It’s absolutely atrocious, so much that I had to actively give myself a mental pep talk to survive the last thirty minutes of its running time. However, on paper you’d think it at least has a chance to produce something refreshing, audacious, and more importantly, funny. As far as the elevator pitch for this story is concerned, it’s quite an intriguing concept to imagine a sudden apocalypse befall the planet, but instead of following a typical American family you’d find in a Roland Emmerich movie, imagine what it would be like to survive this cataclysm together with a group of professional clowns who had gathered to participate in another clown’s funeral before the world ended. In the middle of nowhere in Ireland. What is more, imagine this troupe of clowns, who also travel in a clown car because why not, would be composed of representatives of all ends of the clown spectrum too. There’s a sad clown (Bobo, played by David Earl), a scary clown (Funzo, played by Natalie Palamides), a pretentious mime (Pepe, played by Fionn Foley), a washed-up big circus clown (The Great Alphonso, played by Ivan Kaye). And they are all joined by a conspiracy-inclined journalist (Amy De Bhrún) as they try to make sense of how the world went to hell when they weren’t looking.

Again, as you read it, this elevator pitch promises a lot of potential for comedic exhilaration, especially on the back of the intrinsic wackiness of this outlandish central gimmick. George Kane, who directed the movie (and co-wrote it too) wants you to imagine The Three Amigos meeting a Roland Emmerich movie. Waterworld with laughs. And yes, it’s all there. There’s adventure. There’s a gimmick. There are post-apocalyptic vibes. But because the vast majority of the film’s attempts at making me laugh fall flat on their noses instead of eliciting a reaction, I could not connect with anything Apocalypse Clown was trying to peddle. It was painful to sit through this movie, not because it was poorly put together or because the script wasn’t well engineered. Look, the combined pool of talent and expertise behind this movie should at least in theory have produced a successful cinematic experience.

But comedy is freakishly subjective and all I can say is that because this film’s jokes annoyed and embarrassed me more than anything else, the entire experience was a write-off. I simply could not find enough inner strength to even look for anything else worth my appreciation. If you found a rat turd in your Caesar salad, you wouldn’t just pick it out and continue with your dinner hoping you’d be able to congratulate the chef on his seasoning. No! You’d leave the restaurant in a hurry.

That’s more or less how I felt while watching Apocalypse Now. I suppose the innate risk of making a comedy is hence comparable to putting together a Caesar salad, where you may not be able to know ahead of time if there are any rat turds in your jar of capers. And even if there weren’t any, what distinguishes a great Caesar salad from a not so great one is unquantifiable. It’s down to seasoning and minute detail of composing the constituent parts in a way that connects with whoever consumes it. And the Caesar salad I was served should get the restaurant shut down by health inspectors.

Therefore, proceed at your own peril because I don’t feel it’s a good idea for me to remark on the film’s positives – such as they are – while fully acknowledging that the experience of sitting through it was akin to torture. I’m not going to pull wool over your eyes by telling you that the croutons were crunchy or that the sauce was appropriately creamy. There was a turd in my salad and a turd trumps everything.