Every film buff should make some time in his or her life for watching trash cinema as a corrective to getting too immersed in pretension and worthiness. Apart from light relief, such films help a critic appreciate real quality on those all too infrequent occasions when it appears. So I am always prepared to leave my brains by the door, as long as I can pick them up again on the way out.

It's been a while since I last viewed this cult gem directed by Stephen Chiodo (his sole directing credit) and produced by his two brothers. All three are still in the industry but somewhat down the food chain, mainly involved with special effects. It's the brightly told tale of giant clowns with scary teeth arriving in a small town to harvest its inhabitants by wrapping them in cotton candy/candy floss, so they can suck their blood through funny straws when they feel a little peckish. Clowns, like dolls, are pretty frightening presences, I think, to the easily unnerved and the characters in this movie who are tempted to react positively to them soon learn to their detriment otherwise.

The clowns dispatch their victims by a variety of comedic means including popcorn-loaded guns (where the leftover popcorn grows into miniature clowns), shadow animals that spring to life to devour, and a surfeit of custard pies to bury the unwary. Despite the theme, it is not really a horror movie but more an amusing and affectionate throwback to the alien-threat films of the '50s. The film boasts a largely no-name cast apart from veteran actor John Vernon as the pig-headed local sheriff and old-timer Royal Dano as the first victim, but seeing that it was probably made on a shoestring budget, there would have been no point finding some better-known teens to defeat the baddies.

What I like most about this film is its use of bright primary colors with none of the "let's film it in the gloom to make it really scary" ethos of so many other movies. Thinking about this I realized this is also why I have a soft spot for much of the Troma trash output — you can actually see what is going on! Of course much of Troma boss Lloyd Kaufman's output is complete and utter rubbish, but in the right frame of mind, one can have a really good time with the first Toxic Avenger movies, Monster in the Closet, and even Rabid Grannies. (For the uninitiated, I'll write more on Troma on another occasion.)

I also rewatched Freaked recently, a directing effort by Alex Winter of Bill and Ted fame, which definitely belongs in the trash category. He takes the lead as a bumptious personality who is turned into a hideous freak by freakmaster Randy Quaid to join his collection of oddities. Winter manages to get a cameo from his pal Keanu Reeves as a dogboy, which is probably not a highpoint in that actor's filmography. Truth be told, the film was terrible, but it did serve as a palliative to going back to my usual fare of classics and subtitled foreign features.