Damien Leone’s cult Terrifier series doesn’t care about originality or suspense, only extreme gruesomeness designed to make audiences shriek, squirm, recoil, and hurl. On those limited terms, its third entry, Terrifier 3, in theaters Oct. 11, achieves its ends, serving up a litany of sights designed to shock and offend, lowlighted by a college student being split in two by a chainsaw tearing through his butt cheeks and penis, and a climax involving a woman having a tube hammered into her mouth so she can be fed a collection of hungry rates. In a very basic sense, it’s the horror equivalent of porn, providing profane money shot after money shot amidst lots of superfluous narrative nonsense.
Unlike another recent clown-centric sequel, Terrifier 3 delivers what its fans want, and in grander fashion than its predecessors. Writer/director Leone’s latest boasts a bigger budget, improved camerawork, and enhanced production values, especially with regards to its signature kills, which are squishy, squelchy, and insanely bloody. More, however, doesn’t mean better, as this slasher’s nastiness is only matched by its immaturity and inanity. No matter the uniquely demented charisma of its iconic villain, it’s a rehash whose sole novel idea—setting its action not at Halloween but at Christmas—is itself borrowed from Silent Night, Deadly Night, Christmas Evil, and numerous other genre endeavors.
Terrifier 3’s main draw is Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), a pale-faced ghoul in a black-and-white jumpsuit, giant shoes, and a tiny hat that sits at an angle on his head via a string. A homicidal circus freak who never speaks, he’s like the bastard child of Pennywise and the Little Tramp, and Thornton’s catalog of bug-eyed expressions, disturbing smiles and grimaces, and exaggerated mime reactions have rightly earned him a spot alongside Jason, Freddy, and Ghostface as a memorably creepy cinematic agent of death.
That said, he’s also something of a one-trick pony, and in his newest outing, his schtick has grown perilously thin. Because Leone has no interest in generating tension, Art’s grisly habit of decapitating and dismembering his victims—and then mutilating their corpses and using their innards as props—quickly proves tiresome. Aside from those fleeting instances when he comically responds to insults and murderous opportunities like an X-rated Looney Tunes baddie, he’s a visually striking bore.
David Howard Thornton
CineverseLeone’s story begins with Art slaughtering the family of a little girl who thinks that his rooftop footsteps herald Santa’s arrival, then rewinds five years to explain how Art resurrected himself alongside Vicky (Samantha Scaffidi)—a former disfigured casualty who’s transformed into his acolyte—and finally returns to the present to pick up with Terrifier 2’s heroine Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera).
Since we last saw her removing Art’s head from his shoulders with the magic sword that her comic-book artist dad (Jason Patric) made for her, Sienna has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. At present, she’s headed to the suburban home of her aunt Jessica (Margaret Anne Florence), uncle Greg (Bryce Johnson), and cousin Gabbie (Antonella Rose), who’s thrilled to have Sienna back, even if the young woman remains an unstable survivor who often sees her dead friends and relatives in hostile visions.
Sienna is looking forward to spending the holidays with her family, including brother Jonathan (Elliot Fullam), who’s now a university freshman living with roommate Cole (Mason Mecartea), whose girlfriend Mia (Alexa Blaire Robertson) is a true-crime podcaster obsessed with Jonathan and Sienna’s history with Art. Unfortunately for the siblings, the past isn’t dead and gone in Terrifier 3, since a couple of construction workers have awakened Art and Vicky at the abandoned house where they were hibernating, thus setting the fiends loose during the Yuletide season.
For Art, this is an inapt time to be stalking prey; he is, after all, a spooky spirit of the night. Nonetheless, he acclimates easily, beginning with a pit-stop at a bar where he’s excited to see a jolly fellow (Daniel Roebuck) dressed as Santa, and ultimately slays him and his compatriots (including an amusing Clint Howard) and steals his red-and-white suit and beard.
Decked out in St. Nick’s duds, Art commits murder and mayhem in a variety of predictably outrageous ways (one of which prompts a cameo from genre legend Tom Savini), and the director stages them with such cartoonish sadism that they elicit not revulsion but laughs. This makes Terrifier 3 as repugnant as it strives to be, although a graver sin is its dullness. After the third smashed face, snapped limb, and gutted torso, it all becomes intensely numbing, and Art’s habit of silently laughing at his horrible handiwork, and mocking those he’s maimed beyond recognition, grows old fast.
Nonetheless, those moments are still preferable to the proceedings’ filler narrative, in which Sienna freaks out over the possibility that Art has returned to finish her off, as well as spouts embarrassingly incoherent exposition about the nature of her “chosen one” status and Vicky’s demonic origins and condition.
Lauren LaVera
CineverseTerrifier 3 is a juvenile splatterfest with an ignorable plot, and its performances veer from the competent (LaVera and Thornton) to the inept (most everyone else). Leone scores his carnage to Christmastime staples and tries to generate some black humor from the juxtaposition of joyous festivities and unthinkable butchery, yet he has nothing new to offer; an early shot of Art using an ax to chop through a door and maniacally peering through the opening à la Jack Nicholson in The Shining is evidence of the material’s dearth of imagination. Even by the low standards it sets for itself, the film is a bargain-bin affair, solely elevated by its mute fiend.
In keeping with horror movie tradition, Terrifier 3 offers a fake resolution to its tale, making sure to let viewers know that Art will live to kill another day, undoubtedly in a saga whose homicides will be ghastlier, bloodshed will be more voluminous, and deviance will be fouler. This is, in one respect, the law of the grindhouse, and Leone adheres to it with a rigorousness that will surely satiate the franchise faithful. Unfortunately, the promise of additional wretched series entries is enough to make one groan, if not violently retch.
