"This isn't what you think it is. Nobody stores cotton candy like this."

Horror fans everywhere lost whatever was left of their fragile little minds last week over a trailer for a movie about a scary clown. I am, of course, talking about Stephen King's It just like everyone else. The internet is abuzz with fans who can't wait and fans who can't understand why Pennywise dresses like a 16th-century Flemish nobleman. I'm straddling both camps on this one.

If I have gained any wisdom in my eternity, let me offer this advice to those who can't wait. Treat every day from now until Sept. 8 as a gift, because on that day, if the movie is bad, you'll have to hear a million times how much better Tim Curry was, and if the movie's good, that the book was better.

Besides, there are other scary clown movies to watch while you wait. For instance, I'm here to tell you about a coulophobic comedy classic.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

It's a great pleasure to finally be reviewing this 1988 film by Stephen Chiodo, because it's been a little hard to keep track of. I wanted to tell you about it during the Great Clown Panic of 2016, but it wasn't available with any of the sites I use. Then, right around Christmas, it was on at least one service, then suddenly disappeared. I'm not letting it get away this time.

Killer Klowns is a parody of 1950s flying saucer movies and thus, the beats of the plot are basically the same. A young couple see a shooting star and decide to go see where it landed. They discover a spaceship with hostile aliens on board and go tell the police, who are skeptical. Before you know it, the aliens have abducted half the town. But these aliens are clowns and they do clowny things. Their ray guns encase their human prey in cocoons of cotton candy. They use vicious balloon doggies to track their game. One uses a shadow puppet of a dinosaur to eat whole bunch of people at once. They never speak, but one of them uses Animal House's John Vernon as a ventriloquist puppet.

Slightly gory, very silly, Killer Klowns from Outer Space offers up cool visuals and a lot of laughs. It streams on Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime.