Secret Mall Apartment: Does the name “Fort Thunder” ring a bell? I’d no idea that the Providence artists of Secret Mall Apartment had any connection to the legendary artist enclave that spawned Lightning Bolt, but I should’ve made the connection as soon as I heard the word Providence. As the subjects of Secret Mall Apartment make clear, there’s not much to do in the capital city of Rhode Island, and when the massive Providence Place mall started going up in the late-1990s, these East Siders realized that there was no entrance for them on their side of town. By 2001, local authorities and real estate developers shut down Fort Thunder and had it bulldozed for… parking lots. Maybe a grocery store. No, pretty sure just parking lots. Or vacant lots. Same old story: we saw it here in Baltimore with the Copycat Building, the Coward Shoe, and most recently, dearly departed Floristree, the best venue I’ve ever been in.
Brian Chippendale, artist and drummer for Lightning Bolt, is one of the talking heads in Jeremy Workman’s breezy documentary on the four-year “occupation” of a “negative space” in the Providence Place mall; although not a participant, Chippendale knew what Michael Townsend, Colin Bliss, Adriana Valdez Young, Andrew Oesch, Greta Scheing, James Mercer, Emily Ustach, and Jay Zehngebot were up to. Not so much an open secret as an urban legend, the “secret mall apartment” was discovered and furnished by these eight artists as a practical response to the mall’s colossal imposition on the entire city of Providence; if their homes and studios and venues could be bulldozed for luxury condos that were never built, why couldn’t they find a place in the mall for themselves?
Despite employing documentary clichés—talking heads, dramatic recreations, establishing drone shots—Secret Mall Apartment is sustained by its bananas story and the lingering but unspoken sense that there are no artists today who’d attempt anything similar. The gang, largely led by Michael Townsend, never stole anything nor hurt anyone, and in the end, when they were caught in 2007, the only charges were trespassing. After hundreds of speed runs, shady rendezvouses, and near-misses, the gang maintained the apartment for four years—a sterling success by any measure, one that seems innocent and relatively harmless today. Secret Mall Apartment brings to mind two questions: does anyone have the initiative to do something like this today? And—would anyone make it out alive if they got caught? There’s a pro-forma section on the gang’s “white privilege,” but it’s larger than that: nearly 20 years on, it’s hard to imagine Townsend not getting blown away the instant he’s discovered, white or not.
Clown in a Cornfield: A Shudder Original, here to save the months when movie theaters have nothing to play. Sinners may still be doing business along with A Minecraft Movie—and we can’t forget, though we should, Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, retitled *The New Avengers less than a week after its release—but other than that, it’s a fallow spring. Ben Affleck’s The Accountant 2 is at least five years too late; the concept of an “autistic assassin” is much more fraught and loaded than it was when the original premiered in the fall of 2016, before the election. No matter: the sequel’s doing fine, but is anyone talking about it? Maybe more people than Clown in a Cornfield, but again, I could be wrong: this is an adaptation of a hugely successful Young Adult books, a series with dozens of installments.
Is the movie Clown in a Cornfield any good? For what it is—a Shudder Original—sure. If you like going to the movies just to go to the movies, you could do a lot worse than Clown in a Cornfield. If the abundance of unnecessary CGI in a massive hit like Sinners is distracting, even irritating, the threadbare Clown in a Cornfield is granted the right to look a little lousy. With a budget of only $1 million, director Eli Craig leads a teenage and twentysomething ensemble through honking hell. Katie Douglas, Aaron Abrams, Carson MacCormac, among others, are picked off one by one by their town’s prodigal killer clown; thoroughly post-Scream, characters think nothing of analyzing their situation through the lens of horror movies. Verity Marks, realizing she’s the only non-white character left, also realizes that she’s about to die.
However uninspired and low-rent these kinds of horror movies usually are, they’re preferable to the video game mush of Marvel, Disney, and every other studio’s attempt at some “cinematic universe.” Halfway through the decade, it’s obvious that the defining genre of 2020s cinema will be horror, and while Clown in a Cornfield isn’t on the level of Thanksgiving or The Substance, it’s the kind of movie that would’ve played drive-ins 50 years ago, a brutal and lurid reflection of our times, more in tune with America today than most other movies being made or in release.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits