Well, I've only myself to blame. I did wonder, when I saw Terrifier 2 a couple of years ago, whether I'd bother with a third instalment in a series that started very unremarkably and plummeted immediately into the lowest kind of loathsome, noxious sludge. It seemed unlikely that the series would immediately improve to the point where it suddenly became quality horror and its bogeyman figure Art The Clown would attain the status of bona fide slasher icon, up there at the top table with Michael and Jason and Leatherface. Yet even with the lowest of expectations, I was unprepared for just what a miserable, joyless and utterly boring experience this film turned out to be. On at least two occasions I was tempted to walk out because this is easily one of the worst, most despicable horror movies I've seen in years, if not decades. If there is such a thing as the pornography of violence then Terrifier 3 is probably as close as you'll get.
The synopsis of this mindless, infantile drivel is basically: Art The Clown turns up yet again and butchers a bunch of people. He seems to be targeting Sienna (Lauren LaVera) from the first two movies, but will happily also hack to pieces pretty much anyone who turns up. Sienna has been in a psychiatric hospital since Terrifier 2 and is now released to extended family; meanwhile the reborn Art has sat in a chair for five years until a couple of demolition guys turn up to knock his hideout down. Then it's carnage galore: it's Christmas so Art dresses up as Santa... and butchers a bunch of people.
The trouble with Terrifier 3 is exactly the same as with Terrifier 2: it doesn't know when to stop. That's because Damien Leone, the auteur responsible for this utter garbage, doesn't know either. He's not even aware that there is actually a line in the sand, or that the line might be there for a good reason. Art's first victim here is a boy of about nine, hacked to death with an axe for absolutely no narrative reason at all. (The actual killing happens off camera, but the bloody mutilated corpse is presented for us all to enjoy, hahaha, pass the popcorn.) And midway through the film is a scene in which Art The Clown leaves a parcel bomb in a shopping centre Santa's Grotto to be opened by a small child. It's a cheap, tawdry shock moment that's only there for a sick laugh: if this is a joke, it's an Arthur Fleck joke. Even Leone is surely aware at this point of that line being crossed as one character reacts to the news coverage: "was it a terrorist incident?". To which the answer is actually yes, it was, and Art The Clown is actually a figure that should be dealt with by the FBI, SWAT teams, the Secret Service and Chuck Norris, and not a traumatised teenage mental patient with a magic sword.
The result is a film that wallows in its bloodshed and slaughter, that rejoices in the carnage and dismemberment, because that's all it knows how to do and that's all it wants to do. It doesn't have a charismatic villain: Art The Clown is a boring zero of a wannabe slasher icon: just pure unreasoning evil. In Halloween, Dr Loomis suggets that what was living behind Michael Myers' eyes was pure evil, but, as Kim Newman observes in Nightmare Movies (an essential tome, by the way), Myers "seems to enjoy scaring people more than killing them." Art is not interested in scaring people, merely killing them as bloodily and viciously as possible. Nothing Art ever does is remotely funny: granted, nothing Jason and Michael do are particularly funny either but the crucial difference is they're not supposed to be (let's ignore the fact that clowns aren't funny anyway). Art is enjoying himself far too much with the random killings and if we're supposed to be joining in the fun, we need some semblance of a reason. All the other horror icons of that pantheon, that Art so desperately and pathetically wants to join, have just enough story to make them scary - hell, just a few sentences - but (at least in their earlier episodes) not enough story to diminish them. Art has nothing, and is nothing.
So why do it? Leone must surely know that he can't actually make a good film, nor even a half-decent one, but what he can do is pile up the blood and entrails. He doesn't give a damn about character, about nuance, about storytelling: all he's interested in is getting to the next brutal overkill as quickly as possible and then gloating over it. Because that's all he's got. Like the previous instalment, this exists purely as a showcase for the prosthetics and make-up work and yes, that's a very impressive rendering of a guy being rectally chainsawed. But making the bloodiest slasher movie is like shooting the most explicit porn film, or playing the longest jazz accordian solo. These just aren't records anyone's really interested in breaking any more. Leone seems unaware that the highlights of the horror genre do not, as a rule, dwell on the splat for reels at a time: Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre operate on almost Merchant Ivory levels of bloodshed, and are acknowledged classics.
The great gore movies use their gore for a reason, to make a social comment or a satirical point, but they never use it for wanton cruelty and heartless sadism the way Terrifier 3 does. Merely emptying the steaming offal bucket over the audience does not make a horror classic, but empty schlock rubbish of the Olaf Ittenbach and Andreas Schnaas ilk. This is not a film from a Romero or a Carpenter or a Hooper or a Cronenberg or a Craven, it's a film from the mind of a fourteen-year-old boy who's spent too long under the bedcovers with the dregs of Troma Films and has no conception of the word "Enough", and he really, really needs to grow up. Terrifier 3 ends as a setup for Terrifier 4, and while I wondered whether I would come back for this instalment, I can guarantee that I won't be there for the next. Unlike Damien Leone, I've got better things to do with my time.
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Further thoughts on Terrifier 3 here:
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