The Curse of the Clown Motel (2023) (Blu-ray Review)
DIRECTED BY: Asif Akbar and Lance Kawas
STARRING: Randy Couture, Romeo Miller, Tobin Bell
RATED: UR/Region: O/1:78/1080P/NUMBER OF DISCS 1 (BD-r)
AVAILABLE FROM Vantage Media
The Curse of the Clown Motel is the kind of movie that lures you in with a title so gloriously stupid you have to believe it’ll at least be a good time. Killer clowns? A cursed motel? Maybe some neon-lit desert insanity? Sign me up.
And then… it proceeds to do almost none of that.
Directed by Asif Akbar and Lance Kawas, the film somehow takes a premise that should be pure B-movie junk food and turns it into a slow, oddly serious slog about land disputes, spiritual vengeance, and a whole lot of exposition that feels like it wandered in from a completely different (and much less interesting) movie. The story follows a woman returning to her ancestral land, only to find—surprise!—a creepy clown motel sitting on it, with some supernatural nonsense brewing underneath.
Now, here’s the real kicker: for a movie called The Curse of the Clown Motel, there is a shocking lack of… you know… clowns. Sure, they’re around as set dressing, lurking in the background like unpaid extras, but the actual threat leans more toward a vengeful spirit situation than anything resembling a proper clown massacre. Multiple reviews basically boil down to, “not enough clowns, way too much boredom,” which is honestly an incredible sentence to have to write about a movie like this.
And boredom really is the main villain here. The pacing is glacial, with long stretches where characters talk at each other instead of anything remotely exciting happening. Several viewers have pointed out that it takes a good chunk of the runtime before anything resembling horror even shows up, and by then it’s too little, too late.
When the horror does kick in, it’s… well, let’s call it “ambitious.” There are moments where you can see what they were going for—some creepy imagery, a potentially cool supernatural antagonist—but it’s all undercut by some truly questionable CGI. We’re talking digital blood that looks like it escaped from a mid-2000s video game and decided to ruin every scene it touches.
And yet—here’s where the “kinda positive” part sneaks in—it’s not completely without charm. The actual location of the motel is genuinely creepy, and you can feel that there was a better movie hiding in here somewhere. A few effects, a couple of kills, and the general concept all hint at something that could’ve been a fun, trashy cult favorite if it had leaned harder into the absurdity instead of taking itself so seriously.
Plus, there’s a certain late-night, “how did this get made?” entertainment value to the whole thing. It’s not good, but it’s not aggressively unwatchable either—it just sort of exists in that strange purgatory where you’re never fully engaged, but also weirdly curious how much stranger it’s going to get.
At the end of the day, The Curse of the Clown Motel isn’t the wild, chaotic clown nightmare it promises. It’s slower, duller, and far more confused than it has any right to be. But if you’re the kind of viewer who enjoys digging through low-budget horror oddities just to see where they went wrong, there’s a mildly entertaining experience buried under all the missed opportunities.
Just… don’t check in expecting killer clowns to actually do much of anything.
