Specifically it's the kind of despair that makes me wonder if I want to watch slasher movies any more. It's a horror subgenre I've always had a soft spot for, which may be partly down to nostalgia for the highlights of the golden years as well as honest appreciation for the unkillable bogeyman form when it's done well. The early classics, the first few Michaels and Jasons and a handful of decent imitators like Rosemary's Killer and My Bloody Valentine, have withstood the decades and I'm happy to have the DVDs and Blus on my shelf. But it has to be said that the slasher movies of today simply aren't in their craftsmanship league: I wouldn't give house room to the likes of David Gordon Green's recent trilogy of callous Halloween reboots and the mostly terrible works of Rob Zombie. Now comes Terrifier 2 and I'm wondering if the slasher movie might now be defunct because Damien Leone might just have broken it.
I wasn't much of a fan of the first Terrifier: a grubby, nasty little number in which people were bloodily murdered by Art The Clown and as far as a plot goes, that was it. It had no charm and no class and was basically just about the blood and gore for about 80 minutes and then it stopped. For no reason beyond Leone not knowing where to stop, Terrifier 2 is almost a full hour longer and ups the splatter to insane grossout levels as Art targets high school girl Sienna (Lauren LaVera, who spends the last half of the film dressed as a winged Valkyrie in Wonder Woman armour) and her 12-year-old brother, brutally murdering anyone else in the vicinity as he goes. None of this happens for any adequately explored reasons, despite the film running for one hundred and thirty eight minutes yet having no room amidst the carnage for any kind of explanations, either for character motivations or the increasing supernatural elements.
Miserable and mean-spirited, charmless and heartless, Terrifier 2 just drags on with endless extended scenes of blood and entrails, lovingly rendered with (mostly) old-school practical and physical gore effects. Eyes are gouged, limbs are lopped, genitals are ripped off, heads are scalped and entrails are rent asunder, again and again (presumably it got through the BBFC unscathed because none of the violence is actively sexual). I'm not averse to a good unhealthy slice of sickbag cinema every so often but usually there's something else going on underneath the grue. If all you want is the splatter and mutilations then fill your boots because that's all there is: there's nothing beyond the vom factor. Or watch the Saw movies instead: at least they're funny and at least there's some narrative context for the bloodshed, albeit a bonkers one. By contrast and in comparison, Terrifier 2 is just offal.
It does however raise the question of where it can go from here: not just the Terrifier saga but slasher movies in general. Just piling on even more gore isn't enough: mere viscera by itself is a cul-de-sac and we've now reached the brick wall at the end of it. How about something that's actually interesting, well made and emotionally involving on some level? Or even, dare I say it, something scary? There's no chance of that as Leone has already said that Art The Clown is going to come back for Terrifier 3. Whether I'll come back for Terrifier 3 is far more open to question.
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