Per its low-budget status, Killer Klowns doesn't much bother with the niceties of acting - all three of the leads are stiffs, while an unfunny duo of brothers named the Terenzis (Peter Licassi & Michael Siegel - surrogates for the Chiodos, mayhaps?) engage in cheap comic shtick that Bob Clark wouldn't have let out of the cutting room for Porky's - and occasionally shows its seams in the action shots, too. At one point in the flick, for instance, a squad car crunches into a wall so timidly and poorly synced that you just know director Stephen C. ran out of time-slash-money to do a decent retake, while a scene where heroine Debbie is menaced by mutated popcorn in the bathroom is lensed too limply to work as either scare scene or shower sequence parody.

Despite these flaws, the movie still works and the reason lies in them Killer Klowns. The Chiodos (Charles & Stephen wrote the pic; Stephen directed, and Charles designed the creatures) may lavish more attention on their aliens and the innards of their funhouse spaceship than they do on the niceties of telling a solid story, but the effort pays off. The movie's title figures - with their giant, craggy ear-twitching heads, circus garb and four-fingered hands - are consistently fun to watch as they strut their oversized feet across the screen. Clearly, the manufacture of these creatures was a labor of love for these guys, as is the movie's spaceship interior, which at times recalls the whacked-out Seussian imagery of the criminally underseen 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. Having worked on animated puppets for movies and commercials before Killer Klowns (e.g., Large Marge in Pee-wee's Big Adventure, the T. Rex car ad in Robocop, the clay animated feature I Go Pogo), the Chiodos embrace their creature cast with tons of malicious glee. It's this wholeheartedness which lifts the flick from being just one more campy horror movie parody.

MGM has released Killer Klowns on DVD as part of its "Midnite Movies" series, and among the extras are two amusing pieces of Chiodo juvenilia: homemade monster movies made by the kid filmmakers, one of which features a giant-sized rampaging G.I. Joe with articulated arms and patches of green fuzz all over his body. The bros. may've grown in skill over the years (their most recent work was overseeing the wicked puppetwork in Team America), but at heart they, happily, remain a bunch of Jersey kids with a home movie camera. . .