Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Terrifier 2 (now on Screambox) is very very very very very very very very very gross. It’s also more popular than most cheapo-shoestring blood-drenched viscerafests – surprisingly so, having grossed (pun intended) nearly $8 million at the box office thanks to you-gotta-see-this word-of-mouth and (probably exaggerated, possibly phony) “reports” (read: social media posts by randos) of people puking and passing out in theaters. Either way, the sequel to a 2016 movie called Terrifier that you probably haven’t seen – about a kill-happy maniac dubbed Art the Clown – is a bona-fide sleeper hit, an unrated-by-the-MPAA splatter-slasher that capitalized on its notoriety and the growing dearth of content at the cineplex. Well, now you can watch it at home, all 138 disgustipating minutes of it. Hooray?
TERRIFIER 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: The first shot of the movie is of garbage water. Self-aware foreshadowing? We’ll see! In the coroner’s office, the coroner is about to need a coroner. Choking on blood, he drags himself across the floor, finds a phone, dials 911 and gurgles into the receiver. Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) apparently has risen supernaturally from the slab to kill again. A hole in his skull exposes his brain to the air but it doesn’t seem to faze him. The same cannot be said for the coroner, and I won’t ruin the bowel-churning reveals, but let’s just say Art kinda treats the poor man’s gray matter like a fine and tender nut meat extracted whole from its shell. From there, Art meanders to a laundromat to wash the blood from his clown onesie, and a little murder-clown girl on a bench greets him by blasting black diarrhea on the tile, so sweet, very tender. She has demented eyes and rotten teeth and doesn’t speak, all just like Art, and may be imaginary, or a ghost, who can tell, but she seems to be inspiring him to pursue his current not-very-nice lifestyle.
And then, the opening credits, set to your standard-issue retro-’80s synth score. We meet our teenage protagonist, Sienna (Lauren LaVera), as she crafts her Sexy Winged Valkyrie costume for Halloween. She lives with her little brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) and her high-strung mom (Sarah Voigt). Their dad is finito. Kaputskies. Dead. Jonathan sits in his room, which is decorated with rad Satanic Panic-era King Diamond and Slayer posters, and obsesses over Nazis and serial killers; he even wants to dress as Art the Clown for Halloween. Art the Clown, who only a year prior slaughtered a bunch of people and managed to upset most of the people he didn’t slaughter. Sienna has a nightmare in which she has Pippi Longstocking braids and is on the set of a TV commercial or children’s show and Art stops by to torch the place, and she wakes up to see the angel wings she made go up in flames. Mom, who is the type of mom who yells more than she understands things, doesn’t believe that Sienna didn’t leave her candles burning, even when she didn’t. The fire started supernaturally, see. How exactly this works, I shan’t reveal, nor shall the movie; you’ve been warned.
The rest of the film consists of Art the Clown committing socially unacceptable acts of homicide. Who’s gonna stop him? Sienna, maybe? We have spent a lot of time with her, despite the undeniable fact that she’s boring. But at least she looks great in Sexy Winged Valkyrie garb!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Terrifier 2 is Saw meets A Nightmare on Elm Street meets slow cinema.
Performance Worth Watching: No question, Thornton’s skilled in the craft of wordless physical performance, his pantomime clearly inspired by Marceau, Decroux and Barrault, albeit with more cannibalism and eyeball gouging.
Memorable Dialogue: “…” – Art the Clown (because the movie is better when nobody’s reciting its anemic dialogue)
Sex and Skin: Brief sideboob; brief manbutt; possibly female breasts under all that blood?
Our Take: Well, ain’t Terrifier 2 a knife in the dick. No, really. That’s one of the many unapologetically putrid kills writer/director Damien Leone concocted for the movie, all of them presented in significant and up-close visual detail, entirely with practical effects for that undeniably corporeal squick factor. Do we have to appreciate the craft? Kind of, and admire the filmmaker’s willingness to Go There, to a place of unabashed tastelessness inspired not at all by the “elevated” horror tropes of the current cinema, but by grimy ’80s slasher flicks in which bedlamites chased down scantily-clad women in order to mutilate them. Remember when you’d blind-rent a battered VHS horror movie with demented imagery on the cover, and regret/love it? That’s the vibe here.
One of the criticisms levied at the first Terrifier was its lack of character development and story, and Leone responded with the sequel’s vacuous dilly-dallying, hinting at a plot in drawn-out scenes in which people talk – mostly Sienna and her friends – and get nowhere. There’s definitely more movie this time around, Terrifier 2 pushing well past the two-hour mark, much to its detriment. This is tedious shit. There’s no suspense or dramatic tension, just us wondering what despicable thing Art will do next to some poor person. Leone serves as editor (and sound designer, and one of the special effects and vfx creators), the one job in which he fails to channel the spirit of his hero Art the Clown, who would’ve mercilessly chopped a whole bunch of useless junk out of this movie.
Further description of the film risks devolving into a thesaurus entry for “lacerate.” And to do so also risks revealing the kills and spoiling the movie, because it barely tells a story – a story that’s resolved, simply and appropriately enough, when the killing stops. I will reveal that the film’s most depraved sequence involves Art pouring bleach and salt on his victim’s wounds, which functions as an unintended metaphor for the movie’s relationship with its audience. Of course, some horror audiences actually appreciate such unapologetic overkill. You know who you are, sickos!
Our Call: SKIP IT. I was BORED out of my GORE-D.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.
