Terrifier 3 review – deck the halls with small intestines

Damien Leone's cult favourite killer clown returns for some festive fun in the third instalment in the goretastic franchise.

Through the current schism between the acolytes of “elevated horror” — their crests designed with conspicuously arty symmetry, adorned with overly insistent symbols, and bannered with Latin mottos about trauma — and the forces of a de facto “lowered horror,” the vulgarians have found their greatest champion in the mute mutilator Art the Clown. In his conception as an anonymous, elemental force of merrily meaningless violence equal parts Michael Myers and Tom Cat, in his industry standing as the mascot of a rare bona fide cult phenomenon slathering gore all over the walls of smalltown cineplexes for over three hours at a time, and now, in his targeting of the kitsch treasure trove that is Christmas with the splendid spleen-squelcher Terrifier 3, Art mounts a gloriously grotesque counteroffensive against the poseurs and their po-faced faux-profundity threatening to sterilize his genre. Creator Damien Leone applies a chainsaw to the taint of good taste, splitting it right down the middle until every last iota of respectability has been hemorrhaged away.

Terrifier 2 towered above the mangled corpses of its competition by indulging its own sick fetishes to the point of experimentalism, following the cadences of drone metal in its lengthy, near-surreal torrents of unsparing brutality. At its best, the orgy of bloodletting induced the same unholy trance state as Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, a film that now lends Terrifier 3 its opening salvo of family annihilation. And that’s only the beginning in a practical-effects extravaganza including multiple skulls treated as piñatas, some fun with liquid nitrogen, and an exceptionally creative engineering solution to the question of how to get a living rat into the oesophagus of a living woman. Some pre-release fuss was raised over Art the Clown’s willingness to murder little kids, presumably by people who cannot tell the difference between real life and onscreen make-believe, but this transpires out of frame as if to earn a “No Child Actors Were Traumatized in the Making of This Movie” disclaimer.

The third instalment faces the unique challenge of contending with the franchise’s own popularity, as Leone’s first work produced in the knowledge that he had something like a hit on his hands. (Though slightly less evil than Colin Jost, Art the Clown can likewise be found palling around with Pete Davidson.) A pair of meta-flourishes deal a grisly fate to fans of Art, but Leone’s proximity to success comes through more perceptibly in the calling-card aspirations of a film with structure and thematic concerns closer to normalcy than its predecessors. When not occupied with trials of the human body’s tensile strength, the action rejoins previous final girl Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) as she convalesces at her aunt and uncle’s place, her lumpy Halloween Kills-style processing of nightmares past enlivened only by the occasional schizophrenic hallucination. The fixation on continuity and the attendant sketchy logic of the supernatural has become the series’ Achilles heel, its last tether to a more pedestrian class of horror.

Leone would rather place himself in line with the classics, trading The Exorcist’s crucifix-as-dildo for a shard of glass, and Psycho’s shower curtain for a glass pane. (A cameo from SFX legend Tom Savini continues tracing this lineage into the ‘80s, as do the Panavision anamorphic lenses selected for the touch of Carpenter lent to shots with richer color, texture, and light contrast than most current points of comparison.) Though it’s not like he’s in any danger of joining their ranks; the script really sings in its weirder, off-key moments, like a summarily-dispatched Clint Howard musing “My wife’s dead!” or Sienna yelling “How’d you know I don’t like cereal?” at her little cousin.

The film proffers plenty of funny gifts along these lines, foremost among them a written-for-the-film Christmas tune rivaling the Muppet Christmas Carol’s gold standard, but the real reason for the season is the simple, honest lust for carnage. There’s something curious and pure about the way Leone disassembles bodies, like a child breaking open an old VCR not to see how it works, but to survey and play with the complicated stuff inside. At the dinner table, Sienna’s moppet niece gleefully recalls her own injury from a bicycle accident: “There was so much blood, and this piece of fat oozing out!” Sienna blanches, but the innocent babe just thinks it’s neat.

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Published 10 Oct 2024

Tags: Damien Leone Terrifier