5/10
killer clown, phone sex workers; late 80s late-night sleaze cheese fare, and not very memorable
15 April 2005
Someone calling himself Bobo makes short creepy calls to a "phone fantasy" line. One of the women working there walks home alone through a park, and encounters a man wearing a slightly over-sized clown head mask. She doesn't make the connection to the called named Bobo, for some reason. They play mimed baseball together, and then he kills her with the baseball bat saying "you're out!"

A wisecracking killer clown is stalking the women of the phone sex line. How original (sarcasm).

Police suspicion falls on Kevin - the boyfriend of one of the phone sex workers. He is also in charge of photographing the other women, and he had worked for the estranged husband of the operator of the phone sex company. There are a number of other suspects for the audience, including ones played by character actors Bud Cort and Geoffrey Lewis (the estranged husband) but he's really the only one the police pursue. There are a lot of other character actors in the movie like a detective played by Tracey Walter, and a gratuitous Tab Hunter cameo.

More of the women from the company are killed. There's some gratuitous nudity, though relatively little overall. One scene is a slow-motion photoshoot with a smoke machine and colored lights, set to instrumental music, like a bad 80s music video. Lame. Some of the murders are not particularly graphic, though there are some scenes featuring some blood.

There are some rather stupid scenes, like the fact the characters twice enter Bud Cort's office just after he has left, twice bump the lights, and twice the blinking lights are noticed by Cort. At another point, a character has an alibi for a murder (though it is one he'd used before), but inexplicably rushes away blowing the alibi, only to be caught shortly thereafter. You'd expect for a character to have a good motivation to blow an alibi, but this one doesn't.

Actor Divine shows up towards the end as a male (!) police detective who'd been mentioned a few times throughout the film. The film itself is dedicated to his memory.

The ending of the movie is practically stolen right out of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), though I think it's safe to say at this point there won't be a sequel for Out of the Dark. If anything, a prequel, not a sequel, was hinted at by brief mentions of murders the clown committed while working for the circus prior to the events of this movie.
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