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Christmas and New Year can be a frustrating time for movie buffs. Most of the films on TV I've seen already and the constant Yuletide theme that runs through the majority of scheduling adds a contrived slant to most of the material on offer. The best way to deal with this, I've found, is to seek out those films that have nothing to do with the seasonal festivities at all and I've discovered some little gems using this strategy. Possibly the best of all is a 1988 curio called "Killer Klowns From Outer Space". Apart from having one of THE best movie titles I've ever come across, the movie itself is a low-budget masterpiece worthy of an hour and a half of most people's viewing time.

Set in the sleepy American Town of Crescent Cove, a comet shoots over the surrounding woods and lands in a blaze of light. As the locals hunt down the mysterious object, it soon appears that the comet is, in fact, a space ship that looks just like a circus tent. Manned by aliens that look remarkably like clowns, the new arrivals find their ship has been infiltrated by two teenagers, Mike Tobacco and Debbie Stone. Barely having escaped in tact despite being shot by a gun that fires popcorn (the reason for this becomes apparent later in the plot), the teenagers find and tell the police about the sinister miscreants who, in the meantime, have descended on the town to reap mischief. Blasting the local population with ray guns that ensnare the town's people in cotton candy-like cocoons, somehow the Klowns must be stopped before everybody gets wiped out!

As you can tell from the plot, the movie is distinctly tongue-in-cheek. Directed by Stephen Chiodo with Charles and Edward Chiodo writing the screenplay, this is an early directorial work from the man who designed and supervised the critter aliens in the movie "Critters" from 1986. With a low budget and an unknown cast (apart from John Vernon playing Curtis Mooney, the cynical cop), the heroes of the piece are very definitely the Killer Klowns. With a passing resemblance to the earlier "Gremlins", certainly in terms of outlandish plot line and masochistically appealing creatures, the collection of mainly very tall Klowns charge about the cheaply assembled sets conflicting all manner of circus-related misfortune on the rest of the cast with their plastic toy guns and grinning, alien speak. Where the ingenuity of the screenplay lies is the remarkably imaginative shenanigans the Klowns get up to including blowing up balloons in the shape of a

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