Super Happy Fun Clown is a surprisingly entertaining slasher spoof
It’s hard to get too excited about a movie literally called Super Happy Fun Clown — especially when it’s on Tubi.
But it would be a mistake to write off Patrick Rea’s whacked out murder opus as your standard, zero-effort clown slop. In fact — and even I can’t believe I’m actually typing this — Super Happy Fun Clown is actually kind of a good movie. I mean, it’s not like it’s on par with Schindler’s List or anything like that, but compared to most other murderous clown movies out there it might as well be a long-lost Fellini picture.
The secret to the movie’s success isn’t very secret. Without the performance from lead actress Jennifer Seward this film would’ve crapped out and died about 20 minutes in. She bring this airiness and vulnerability to a role most actresses would’ve played as pie-in-the-sky zany, and even more impressive, she actually manages to get across a range of emotions without saying a single word. For like three-fourths of the movie Seward’s character is total mime mode and she’s able to say so much through eye movement and slight hand gesticulations. Marcel Marceau would certainly be proud of her efforts here.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. ANY movie about a murderous clown these days is automatically going to be compared to Terrifier. And while this movie does share some similarities to that franchise, it’s really closer aligned to something like Silent Night, Deadly Night or Maniac in the sense that the film at least tries to paint a portrait of psychosis and explain why its main character embarks upon a string of increasingly violent murders. At heart, Super Happy Fun Clown is closer to The Joker than it is Terrifier and probably owes more to a film like Falling Down than it does any other killer clown flick. It ultimately becomes a movie about a disturbed woman who finally loses hope and decides it’s time to make all of society pay for her own personal disappointments. It’s not a coincidence that the film begins with the definition of the term atychiphobia … the fear of failure.
This is one of those movies where you know who’s going to die as soon as they’re introduced. The chain-smoking, hyper-critical mother who chastises her daughter for only making $900 per paycheck? The unsupportive lout of a husband who just sits around eating spaghetti all day? The potential love interest at work who has never seen Starry Eyes or The Monster Squad? Yep, they’re all sitting ducks, completely oblivious to the gory fates that will inevitably meet them. Super Happy Fun Clown isn’t a movie that tries to surprise you with unexpected plot twists; rather, it’s more concerned with giving you EXACTLY what you expect, and with as much blood spatter as possible in the process.
It’s a film that calls to mind that old 1980 movie Fade To Black. Indeed, the movies follow parallel trajectories — only instead of the protagonist-antagonist of Super Happy Fun Clown being a movie-obsessed incel, she’s a serial killer-obsessed social isolate whose only source of joy in the universe is playing “Jenn-O The Clown” for bored and untrusting children on the weekends. Maybe director Rea was trying to make some sort of cultural commentary on women’s roles and societal expectations there, but I sorta’ doubt it. When the heroine of your film has Jeffrey Dahmer calendars on her bedroom wall and likes to run over senior citizens for fun, I doubt insightful commentary on the human condition is a priority.
It takes a while for the horror show to begin, but when it does it gets really bizarre, really fast. I have to give the filmmakers some credit here, because this movie contains a scene that’s made me come closer to puking in my Raisin Bran than just about anything I’ve watched in two or three years. You see, there’s this part where Jennifer walks over to one of her rotting victims, pulls out a knife, stabs his bloated corpse a few times and decides to … well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. And if you think that’s beyond the pale, just WAIT until you see what Jennifer does after she kills her mom — it takes a LOT to shock me with these kinds of movies, but rest assured, Super Happy Fun Clown had me SHOOK with that particular scene.
The thing that elevates Super Happy Fun Clown from being surprisingly enjoyable Tubi trash to low-key great 2020s shock cinema is its third act. There’s an absolutely brilliant plot twist that sees our murderous main character swap out her harlequin duds for an off-brand Juggalo outfit and hide out in a haunted house attraction. Which means she gets to stumble around and interact with all sorts of “scare actors” portraying iconic celluloid monsters. This is the most avant-garde part of the entire movie and, in a truly insane way, it almost becomes hauntingly beautiful. There’s a totally silent sequence with Jennifer and a guy playing Count Orlock from Nosferatu and it’s completely entrancing stuff; it never veers off into 100 percent arthouse territory, but its nonetheless the kind of material you’d never expect in a movie of its ilk.
Of course, the movie knows it’s trash shlock so we don’t have to wait too long before the bodies start piling up again. A guy dressed up as a mummy gets incinerated, a dude playing Frankenstein’s monster (fittingly enough) gets electrocuted and we even get a nice little Night of the Demons homage when Jennifer runs into another goth-clown girl and they make out for no discernible reason whatsoever. By the way, only one of them walks away from the sequence with their tongue still intact.
Yes, the ending of the film is a bit of a letdown considering how well the rest of the movie flows. We get your stereotypical final confrontation with the law-and-order, by-the-book cop and a hospital bedside coda after that which kinda sets up a potential sequel but not really. I’m not really sure how you’re supposed to end a movie called Super Happy Fun Clown, but I get the feeling a lot of viewers are going to be disappointed by its final, final stretch. Still, it’s hard to complain too much about what this movie gives you, especially if you’re heading into it with minimal (if not sub-atomically inconsequential) expectations.
At a time when lesser websites are actually describing $20 million genre movies with national releases on 2,000-plus screens as “indie horror,” we need films like Super Happy Fun Clown to roll around and remind us of what ACTUAL indie horror resembles. It’s a low-budget labor of love with no aspirations of mainstream approval — a movie like this isn’t engineered to make glorified private equity firms masquerading as film studios millions of dollars, but to impress the few and the proud who still consider gross-out gore comedies as valid currency. It’s not for everybody, obviously — but the people who “get it” are probably going to love and respect the hell out of it.
GIVE IT A WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Matricide, the first four Insane Clown Posse albums, not paying for Netflix
Director: Patrick Rea
Writer: Eric Winkler
Starring: Jennifer Seward, Nicole Hall, Matt Leisy, Deborah Madick
Distributor: The Horror Collective
Runtime: 88 minutes
Language: English
Release Date: 2026 (on streaming, at least)
