‘Apocalypse Clown’: Galway Review

Dir. George Kane. Ireland. 2023

A ramshackle comedy which brings the term ‘clowning around’ to new levels of silliness, George Kane’s feature follow-up to the similarly offbeat rockumentary Discoverdale (2012) is a low-budget collaboration with the same Irish comedy/music troupe Dead Cat Bounce. There’s a baked-in unsustainabilty to this series of increasingly absurd sketches which only tenuously make up a whole, and Kane’s TV-focused career is evident across feature length. Yet the cheerfully offbeat gag-a-minute ethos and some out-there performances mean this brilliantly-titled film should find an audience on UK/Irish release September 1 following a Galway Film Fleadh world premiere (with box office skewing toward the former territory). Charades handles sales; coulrophobics need not apply.

Cheerfully offbeat gag-a-minute ethos and some out-there performances

Best savoured perhaps as part of a well-refreshed audience, at home or on the big screen, Apocalypse Clown is a very local comedy. It’s delightfully batty in parts, groan-worthy in others, but overall the ethos is to just keep firing. Some shots land even as others could clearly have been finessed, but Kane’s mission is to move fast enough that audiences doesn’t have time to reflect. The same can be said for the production ethos: the clown costumes and make-up hurl colour at the screen as the film moves from one low-rent location to the next. (There’s a particularly no-frills field that hosts an extended sequence: the film shot in Dublin and Kildare, which you feel could have provided better backdrops.) 

David Earl leads the charge as depressive and wildly inappropriate clown Bobo, whose slogan ‘cheaper than babysitting’ is painted on his clapped-out, hand-cranked Renault 4. (His low-tech transportation becomes important after solar flares take out Ireland’s electricity.) The aim of the screenplay is to get Bobo, insecure mime Pepe (Fionn Foley) and ‘scary Street Clown’ Funzo (Natalie Palamides) to the funeral of international clowning legend Jean Ducocque (you can see where those gags are heading) before society is brought to its knees by an electrical wipeout.

Once there, they encounter Bobo’s nemesis, the gag stealing Great Alfonso (Ivan Kaye), and his love interest Jenny Malone (Amy De Bhrún), a reporter who once shagged Bobo in a broom cupboard and has regretted it ever since. Two moving statues are in hot pursuit – James Joyce and the Statue of Liberty – and there are a few other hit-or-miss threads, about former boy band member Tim from Bromanz (Tadhg Murphy), and a drug-fuelled rave that turned feral after the music died.

Apocalypse Clown lives or dies by the enthusiasm of its actors, and Earl commits to a lovely sad-sack performance — not quite so much out-there as Palamides, dressed throughout as some sort of deranged mixture of Pennywise and Chucky and sporting an undetermined ‘European’ accent. Palamides is an Edinburgh-award-winning comedian and the creator of Netflix show Nate - A One Man Show; when the dialogue scores, and even when it doesn’t (some is almost impossible to deliver), Palamides is always worth watching. 

Kane’s film won’t convert everyone to the dying art of clowning, mostly mining it for quick gags. Still, though, with everyone onscreen – and in the writers room – having such a rocking good time, it seems churlish to refuse to join in.