THE CLOWN AT MIDNIGHT

Margot Kidder and Christopher Plummer

THE CLOWN AT MIDNIGHT (1998). Director: Jean Pellerin. 

For some reason teacher Ellen Gibby (Margot Kidder) feels that the students in her drama class should clean up an old theater now owned by the college. One of the students, Kate (Sarah Lassez), who is psychic, is freaked out by being in the theater -- originally an opera house -- because her mother, a soprano, was murdered there, supposedly by a jealous tenor,  Lorenzo Orsini (Jonathan Barrett), who was playing Canio in Pagliacci. The former owner of the theater, Caruthers (Christopher Plummer), wishes everyone well and the gang sets about cleaning up the place amidst the usual hijinks. Then a clown starts killing everyone off.

Tatyana Ali and guess who?

The Clown at Midnight is a by-the-numbers horror film. The characters are mostly stereotypes, and the cliches come fast and thick. The killings show a minimum of inventiveness. It's all professional enough, even if some of the actors are quite unseasoned, but it's no different from a thousand other similar movies, and has no real distinction of its own, not even the revelations that the heroine makes about herself, nor the not-terribly-surprising identity of the killer. I'm not certain how Kidder and Plummer wound up in this low-budget opus, but everyone needs a paycheck. Kidder is dispatched with a squishy ax to the head early on, while Plummer -- who is as good as ever -- manages to hang around until the climax, although he only has a couple of scenes. 

Sarah Lassez with Plummer

With its plot of people trapped in a theater with a mad killer on the loose, The Clown at Midnight reminds one of the much gorier -- and better -- Stage Fright, and this isn't the only film with a similar premise. At the end, with the mutilated corpses of her classmates lined up in the first row of the theater, Kate and the lone other survivor get all cute and walk out of the theater as if they've just experienced. say, a tiring day of cleaning -- you would hardly imagine that they just survived a veritable slaughter of over half a dozen people that they knew! This makes the ending almost comical. There is some suspense in the final quarter, however. 

Verdict: Even if you haven't seen it, you've seen it! **1/4.