Butler's Cinema Scene

“KLOWN” My rating: B-  (Opening August 3 at the Alamo Draughthouse)

89 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Featuring a “Bad Santa” level of reprobate behavior and more embarrassing situations than “The Hangover” and “There’s Something About Mary” combined, “Klown” may be that rarest of cinematic beasts: a foreign film that appeals to mainstream tastes.

This Danish comedy from Mikkel Norgaard teams two infantile adult males with a 12-year-old introvert and plops them all down in a canoe trip. Whatever could go wrong does go wrong.

Frank (Frank Hvam) is a gangly, goofy middle-aged doofus who has just learned his girlfriend is pregnant. Perfectly aware of his irresponsible proclivities, she’s considering an abortion.

To prove his paternal potential, Frank agrees to look after his young nephew Bo (Marcuz Jess Petersen) for an extended weekend. They’ll take a canoe trip with Frank’s friend Casper (Casper Christensen).

Bo is an uncommunicative phlegmatic lump obsessed with his penis size. Casper is an omnivorous horndog who sees the canoe trip as an opportunity to jump high school girls and to attend a convention of international hookers. No, seriously.

Anyway, for their various misbehaviors the trio are thrown out of a family campground, take refuge with a woman who lives by the riverside (and is more than willing to let both grown men share her bed), attend a major rock festival, hit a mansion stocked with the aforementioned prostitutes, and ingest all sorts of intoxicants.

Between raunchy episodes, though, Frank (who really is trying to do the right thing) and Bo do bond, leaving “Klown” with a happy ending.

Here’s the bottom line.  You may hate yourself for laughing (where do you stand on masturbation jokes?) … but you’ll laugh anyway.

“Klown” was “adopted” by the Alamo theater chain as part of its policy of giving distribution to films that otherwise might never be exposed to American audiences. Well, you can consider “Klown” to have been exposed. In more ways than one.

Robert W. Butler