After Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) recovers from his decapitation, he takes a five year rest before picking up where he left off with Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) and her brother, Jonathan (Elliot Fullam).
Before the release of Terrifier 2 (2022), I decided to give All Hallow's Eve (2013) a watch. Because that was the very first appearance of Damien Leone's evil trickster, Art the Clown. I was unimpressed and quite bored with that collection of short films. A fact that makes my decision to watch Terrifier (2016), Art the Clown's first feature length adventure in torturous carnage, the very next day something of a minor miracle.
While I thought there was a moderate amount of technical improvement with the feature, aided in no small part by David Howard Thornton's casting as Art the Clown, I was still bored. Very, very bored. It takes more than copious amounts of gore and special make-up effects to maintain my interest and enthusiasm with a film. I need to be engaged with the material on either an emotional or intellectual level. Neither film did that for me. So it goes.
But the word of mouth, despite a great deal of that word being gloating over how people were throwing up and/or passing out at various screenings, I decided to give Terrifier 2 a big screen test and was both surprised and delighted at how entertaining I found the sequel to be. Sure the gore and sadism were insanely over the top, but Terrifier 2 had something the previous films did not. Interesting characters that I enjoyed getting to know... before most of them were viciously slaughtered, of course.
Terrifier 3, at first, does a commendable job of doing the exact same thing all over again, only this time at Christmas, instead of Halloween. A whole bunch of new characters, every bit as doomed as the ones in the previous entries, are introduced and developed as if their stories and lives actually mattered. There is also some interesting and intriguing world-building that occurs. Which I liked, a lot.
I admired both Leone's dexterity at setting up and paying off several plot elements as well as his ability to create a palpable Christmas atmosphere in this entry. The "pass the rice" scene was, I think, a terrific way of showing just how bad Sienna's PTSD is. Just how traumatized she was by the events of the previous film. I also liked how the True Crime podcast storyline played out.
But those upswings were not enough to keep the film's narrative motor gunning for a two hour runtime. In the film's second half that narrative sputters and stalls. Which makes what should be a climatic smackdown between Art and Sienna nothing but an interminable and seemingly endless torture sequence. I began to squirm in my seat, somewhat from the discomfort of watching the torture, but also from the frustration of waiting for something interesting to happen.
Something interesting was teased and promised... for the inevitable Terrifier 4. Which had me walking out of the theater feeling disappointed, used, and abused. At this point there will need to be actual confirmation that Terrifier 4 bothers to deliver on that promised something before I agree to pay to see it on the big screen.
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