History Film / KillerKlownsFromOuterSpace

''Killer Klowns from Outer Space'' is a 1988 horror/comedy BMovie created by the Chiodo brothers, a team of creature effects designers and animators. It is the only film they wrote or directed.

->''"Killer clowns from outer space? [[DeadpanSnarker Holy shit]]."''

* BigBad: Jojo the Klownzilla, who is [[LargeAndInCharge literally much bigger than all the other Klowns, shows up as their leader]] in the climax.

* AfraidOfClowns: In a [[DeletedScenes deleted scene]], Debbie has a bad experience with clowns as a child. That made Debbie afraid of clowns ever since.

* KickTheDog: Literal example. The first on-screen casualty of the Klowns' rampage is farmer Green's pet dog "Pooh Bear". Farmer Green outlives the dog for just a minute or so, though. In the scene where Mike and Dave return to the cotton candy room to find Debbie, you can see a noticeably smaller cocoon behind them, which is supposed to be the dog's.

* DevouredByTheHorde: The Big Top Burger employee who gets lured and pulled inside the fast food's dumpster by the popcorn Klown hatchlings to get painfully eaten alive.

* ImpossibleShadowPuppets: Slim makes hand shadows of a variety of complicated subjects that seem to bear no relation to the movements we see of its stubby fingers. At one point it makes a shadow puppet of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Crossing_the_Delaware Washington crossing the Delaware]]. Then it makes the shadow of a T. Rex that swallows its audience.

** Funnily enough, Rudy suddenly gets a nervous attitude when he sees two girls approaching him on the way to the pharmacy and so he disguises himself as a pharmacy stand as to not give away his position.

** Mooney at first feels like he's in control of the situation when he arrests Jumbo and puts him in a cell. When he bonks the Klown's head with his baton and Jumbo [[ExorcistHead twists his head backwards in anger]] however, this confidence quickly turns into fear for Mooney which he tries masking through threatening Jumbo, though this leads to him getting killed. Then there's the two college boys who were thrown into the same cell Jumbo was put in who clearly feel uneasy with the new cellmate who killed a cop in front of them.

** The security guard at the circus who gets utterly alarmed and flabbergasted at the Klowns exiting a small car in front of him.
** Mike, Dave, and Debbie get terror-strickened when seeing the Klowns surround them with clubs all with murderous intent. Then Mike, Dave, Debbie, and the Terezi brothers as well as the Klowns themselves get filled with fear and look as if they soiled themselves when Klownzilla makes his entrance.

* MassiveMultiplayerScam: One of the local policemen, Mooney, thinks that he's being the target of one of these (that somehow involves ''all of the town's residents'') to drive him nuts and force him to quit being a policeman. And because of this, [[PoliceAreUseless he absolutely refuses to believe that alien Klowns are abducting and killing people]], even when his superior officer calls through the radio asking for him to request backup (he just assumes he's in on it, too). Goes without saying that the threat is real and it ends up killing him.

* OneBookAuthor: The Chiodo brothers primarily design creature and makeup effects, as well as doing puppetry, and this is the only film they wrote or directed. Their other work includes designing the "troll" effects for ''Film/ErnestScaredStupid'', the 'Crites' in the ''{{Film/Critters}}'' film series, the animation for the "6000 SUX" commercial in ''Film/RoboCop1987'', the titles for the ''{{Music/Thriller}}'' music video, and the "ghost" animatronics for Ride/UniversalStudios' ''Theatre/GhostbustersSpooktacular''. They've also provided puppets, animatronics, models and StopMotion in other shows and films, such as ''Series/CharlieHorseMusicPizza'', ''Series/NinjaTurtlesTheNextMutation'', ''Series/AdventuresInWonderland'', ''Film/{{Gremlins}}'', ''[[ComicStrip/{{Pogo}} I Go Pogo]]'', ''Series/{{Goosebumps}}'', ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'', ''Series/PowerRangersTurbo'' ([[Film/TurboAPowerRangersMovie and its movie]]), ''Series/PowerRangersInSpace'', ''Film/TeamAmericaWorldPolice'', ''Film/{{Screamers}}'', ''Series/MaskedRider'', ''Film/TheStupids'', ''VideoGame/ItCameFromTheDesert1992'', ''Series/TheMrPotatoHeadShow'', ''Series/SabrinaTheTeenageWitch'', ''Series/{{Roseanne}}'', ''Series/TheThundermans'', ''Series/{{Bibleman}}'', ''{{Film/Elf}}'', and ''Film/PeeWeesBigAdventure''.

* AliensSpeakingEnglish: The Klowns mostly speak their own language, but there are a few scenes where they speak English by mimicking others voices.

* BloodlessCarnage: The Klowns don't seem to bleed.

* DeadGuyPuppet: Jumbo uses [[spoiler:Mooney]] as a ventriloquist's dummy in order to talk to Dave, apparently shoving its hand into his back.

* DefeatEqualsExplosion: Destroy a clowns nose, and they go up in a big boom.

* FatBastard: Most of the Klowns have a pear-shaped physique, but [[MeaningfulName Fatso and Chubby]] in particular are morbidly obese with very fat, swollen faces.

* ImAHumanitarian: The reason the Klowns came to earth was to harvest people for consumption, with this reveal being shown when Chubby uses a straw to drink from a cotton candy cocoon.

** Though there's still the possibility that she may have been cocooned later with the rest of the townsfolk, unless her family lives outside and left after dinner before the invasion.

* OhCrap: Happens quite a lot among the characters.
** When farmer Green and Jumbo meet, at first the farmer is calm and smiles at the Klown. Once Jumbo pulls out his cotton candy cocoon gun and zaps the poor farmer, a terrified Green lets out a frightened scream.
** When Debbie and Mike stumble upon the cotton candy cocoon storage room, Debbie is already nervous from the Big Top experience while Mike is unconcerned. Then Mike tears a piece from the cocoon off and reveals a corpse and now the two are horrified and wonder who would even do this. Doubly so since one of the Klowns, Rudy, comes in with a new cocoon and the two have to hide, only for Mike to drop the lantern, alerting the Klown to their presence.

** When a man entertained by a puppet show sees Spikey rising up from the stand, he goes from laughing to being scared out of his wits at the Klown poised to kill him.
** The pharmacy owner Mr. Myers gets horrified when he sees Rudy and Shorty making a mess at his pharmacy while they're checking out the products.
** The girl who seems relaxed (and a bit drunk) at being greeted with pizza by Bibbo gets frightened when Shorty pops out of the pizza box.

** Dave has two of these moments. First when he investigates a car and finds out the Klown threat is real. Second is when he goes back to the police station, sees Jumbo's "work", and sees Jumbo himself using Mooney as a DeadGuyPuppet and deciding to try to kill him.
** Many of the citizens of Crescent Cove who called Mooney when the Klowns started attacking them.
** When a man named Joe sees Slim driving with a supposedly invisible car, he gets scared shitless and tries to drive away, though it is futile since Slim rams into and kills him through a car crash and he gets frightened even more when he sees that he's about to die.
** Mike and Dave have this reaction when they see Slim use shadow puppets to kidnap a group of people at a bus station.
** Mooney at first feels like he's in control in the situation when he puts Jumbo in a cell. When he bonks the Klown's head with his baton and Jumbo turns his head backwards in a rage however, this confidence quickly turns into fear for Mooney which he tries masking through threatening Jumbo, though this leads to him getting killed. Then there's the two college boys who were thrown into the same cell Jumbo was put in who clearly feel uneasy with the new cellmate who killed a cop in front of them.

** The Terenzi Brothers and Mike get scared at seeing the Klown Parade, especially the former who finally realize that Mike is telling the truth about the Klown invasion after not believing it before. They get even more fearful when they notice Debbie getting kidnapped by the Klowns in a balloon.
** The security guard at the circus gets utterly alarmed and flabbergasted at the Klowns exiting a small car in front of him.
** Mike and Dave get spooked when they see Fatso drinking from a cotton candy cocoon.

--> '''Biker:''' What are you gonna do, [[TemptingFate knock my block off]]?

* PintSizedPowerhouse: Shorty knocks a grown man's head clean off with a single punch. Justified because the Klowns are actually extraterrestrial monsters.

* SkewedPriorities: When Jojo the Klownzilla comes to destroy the ice cream truck, Dave orders the Tenenzi brothers to get out of there but they can't because the ice cream truck they're using is rented.

* TechnicolorDeath: The only way to kill a Klown is by popping their noses, which makes them spin around in a green light show before exploding. All in all, killing a Klown is just as dangerous as blowing up dynamite within a blast radius you risk being in, but just letting the Klown live is an even worse choice.

* TooDumbToLive: The uncocooned citizen during the Klown parade scene who could've survived had he just waited until they were gone. Admittedly the Klowns themselves to an extent; they have figured out advanced space travel, but can't be bothered to protect their only AchillesHeel.

* WallCrawl: Implied when Dave returns to the police station, and sees Jumbo's colorful footprints on every wall of the cell block.

* YouGetWhatYouPayFor: A positive example of this trope. The Terenzi brothers refuse to abandon the truck to escape the clown's spaceship since it was rented. This gives Clownzilla enough time to throw the truck, causing it to explode into a fiery grave. It turns out they survived by hiding in the apparently very well reinforced freezer and jumping into the clown car escape pod in the nick of time. It's never shown how much they paid to rent it, but if the duo were afraid of having to pay the damages, the reinforced freezer implies they did not get ripped off.

-->-- '''Mooney'''

* YouGetWhatYouPayFor: A positive example of this truck. The Terenzi brothers refuse to abandon the truck to escape the clown's spaceship since it was rented. This gives Clownzilla enough time to throw the truck, causing it to explode into a fiery grave. It turns out they survived by hiding in the apparently very well reinforced freezer and jumping into the clown car escape pod in the nick of time. It's never shown how much they paid to rent it, but if the duo were afraid of having to pay the damages, the reinforced freezer implies they did not get ripped off.

* EnemyRisingBehind: The largest of the popcorn Klown spawn rises up behind Debbie from the toilet bowl in this fashion.

In spite of director Stephen Chiodo's best efforts, no sequel or television series has emerged. Creator/SyFy attempted to make a movie for their channel but couldn't purchase the rights, then in 2020 a story spread about 20th Century Fox silently buying the rights to make a theatrical movie but then [[ScrewedByTheNetwork Disney aborted the project after the acquisition of Fox]]. This was assumed to be the end of the line, until in March 2022 [[Creator/MetroGoldwynMayer MGM]] turned out to be still holding the rights to the film (which they bought as part of the Epic library in the late 90s) and with the announcement of Creator/{{Amazon}} purchasing their library, there could be a new chance for the Klowns to return, which remains to be seen as its DevelopmentHell state continues.

* SexyJester: The Terenzi brothers seem to think the two female clowns are this but most viewers wouldn't agree.

''Killer Klowns'' has also earned its own Scare Zone at the [[Ride/UniversalStudios Universal Studios Orlando]] event for Theatre/HalloweenHorrorNights in 2018. It later returned to the event in 2019 and 2022 as a Haunted House walkthrough.

During the Gamescom 2022 opening night, it was revealed a Multiplayer game adaption of the film was being made, with the executive producer of ''VideoGame/FridayThe13thTheGame'' helming it. Watch the trailer [[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ilwcOZTBa64 here]].

* {{Troll}}: The Klowns have a habit of messing with their victims rather than just zapping them. Some memorable highlights include the Klowns delivering pizza and chocolates to peoples' houses, Jumbo spraying Mooney with a water-spraying flower and then letting himself be arrested, and performing a puppet show.