A maniacal clown named Art terrorizes three young women on Halloween night, and everyone else who stands in his way.

I love me a cold open. A movie just plunks you down in the middle of a situation (like, say, a television interview) and then pulls the rug out from under you (like, say, the interviewee having a hideously disfigured face and violent and bloody intentions) and doesn’t explain anything. Yet. I appreciate that.

And then we cut to Art the Clown, putting on his black-and-white clown outfit, spreading makeup on his face, and packing up some very dangerous weapons into a sack that he slings over his shoulder.

It’s Halloween night, and friends Tara and Dawn are walking along the street, coming back from a drunken good time, still in their costumes.  They bicker about who will drive home, and then end up in a pizza place and order a couple slices. While they wait, Art the Clown comes in, sits down, and stares at them. And stares. Dawn feeling tipsy, sits on his lap and takes a selfie. He doesn’t move, he doesn’t flinch.  He kind of freaks them out, so they eat quickly and head back to the car only to find that someone (wonder who?) has slashed their tires.

While they wait for Tara’s sister to show up and drive them home, Tara runs into a nearby building to go pee. Meanwhile, Art the Clown has brutally slaughtered the pizza employees in overly graphic, almost cartoonishly bloody ways.

Okay. So it’s one of those movies.

The rest of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game between Tara, et. al., and the undying, vicious, nearly supernatural Art the Clown, and it is pretty pretty good.  Art uses a variety of deadly instruments to hack and slash his way through this flick, and copious amounts of blood are shed along the way. Copious. Like, gallons.

The special makeup effects by writer-director Damien Leone and producer Phil Falcone are some of the best and goriest I’ve seen in a long time. They take you by surprise and are unrelenting in their viciousness. Jenna Kanell as Tara and Catherine Corcoran as Dawn are fine as the doomed friends, but they’re basically there to provide fodder for Art’s mayhem, played with perfection by David Howard Thornton. He is so creepy and weird and delightfully demented as the homicidal clown–really fun to watch.

Damien Leone makes this a fun roller coaster ride and, even though he lets the camera linger a bit too long on Art’s gleeful torture of his victims, this movie grabs you from the get-go and will not let up until the final frame. Uncle Mike sez: check this clown out!