Over at the table, Sam is still getting her bitch on with Clown Corbin. She snatches off his clown nose and demands her necklace. He stands up and says, "I don't know what you're talking about." Hazel comes up. "I don't serve crooks in my place. Now get out!" Clown Corbin stomps out.
Meanwhile, Ellie is still going off on Clown Mike's book. "The main character keeps pontificating about his past!" "It was symbolic imagery of his inner state," Clown Mike says. Ellie tells him he needs to consult a dictionary. Then she's all, "Wow! I am so glad I got that all off my chest! I was really dreading telling you all this!" Mike says that he's humiliated, and dude, I'm sure Eddie Cahill is, too, in that makeup Then Hacky The Clown gets up and walks out.
Outside, Clown Mike sees Clown Corbin go behind a fence into a vacant lot. Some non-clown slackerish guy walks out, calls Clown Mike "Chuckles," and walks off in the same direction as Corbin. "Hey! Hey, creep! Get away from me!" the guy yells. Sounds of struggling. Clown Mike goes over to see what's going on. The Xylophone Of Minor-Chord Creepiness tinkles away as Clown Mike peers around the fence and looks down with his clown face in horror. I'm pretty sure this scene will freak out little kids in exactly the same way this one Fantasy Island scene totally wigged me out when I was a kid. See, there was this one episode that had something to do with a lady who was having this recurring nightmare about being in her childhood room and all her mechanical toys turn on, you know, like the monkey-playing-the-drum toy, and the ballerina music box, and her battery-powered walking doll WHICH WAS EXACTLY THE SAME DOLL I HAD, and then her beloved clown doll stands up and suddenly it's life-size and it does this freaky wobbly crazy dance and then ITS HEAD COMES OFF and FIRE COMES OUT OF ITS NECK and suddenly her whole room is on fire and all her toys are on fire and the monkey is going all buppita-buppita-buppita, beating the drum, on fire, and then there's this close-up of MY DOLL with ITS FACE ALL CHARRED AND MELTING and I sat and watched the whole fucking thing and even then I knew that Fantasy Island was a campy, awful show, but still I kept my doll face-down in the closet for two years and was even afraid to move it because I thought it would spontaneously combust. Anyway, this scene is every bit as fucked-up: the tinkly-tinkly music plays and Clown Mike looks down and the camera slowly pans up Non-Clown's body until it gets to the headless collar and a big gooey tempera puddle of orangey blood on the ground in front of it, and then there's a quick pan up to Clown Mike's cakey white clown face, gaping with his big red mouth.









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