As a general rule of thumb, it's a good idea to stay away from horrorflix that are deliberately made as camp. They're like Old Navy holiday commercials: no matter how much winking irony the creators slather on the surface, their deep awfulness ultimately makes 'em unbearable. Spend ninety minutes with the low-budget self-consciousness that is Attack of the Killer Tomatoes or its more modern off-off-Broadway equivalent, Psycho Beach Party, and you find yourself longing for the earnest ineptness of an Ed Wood movie. Oh, for the days of Bert I. Gordon, when hacks who didn't know any better, quickly churned out product meant for horny drive-in teens too inattentive to notice the occasional mic shadow.

There are, of course, exceptions to the horror camp rule, and the Chiodo Bros.' Killer Klowns from Outer Space is one of 'em. Released in 1987, this cheesily demented gem concerns the seaside town of Crescent Cove, which is invaded one night by a tent-shaped saucer packed with alien klowns. Said creatures ("Some kind of animal from another world that looks like klowns," one character posits) stroll through the small town largely unnoticed until they pounce on their unsuspecting prey, aiming a brightly colored ray gun at their victims which cocoons the humans in cotton candy, then carting each cocoon back to their ship where they're kept as a source of interstellar nutrition. (At one point, we see a space klown stick a large crazy straw into one of the cocoons and drink blood from it.) They utilize all the tricks of the trade to lure unsuspecting prey - a hand-puppet show in the park, killer pies, a balloon animal dog that can sniff out its target, shadow puppets that devour their audience, oversized boxing gloves that literally knock a victim's head off - and because they look so goofy, few of their victims initially recognize that they're a threat.

The ones that do recognize the menace - in the best AIP tradition - are the town's young people: Mike (Grant Cramer), Debbie (Suzanne Snyder, doing her darndest to come off as perky as P.J. Soles and just missing it) and Police Academy grad Dave (John Allen Nelson). Of course, they can't get elder authority (repped by John Vernon, playing at his usual pissed-off level) to listen until it's too late. It's a given in these movies that the authorities never see what's coming in time, even when the warnings are directly handed to 'em: a difficult-to-refute premise, given the events of recent years.