Run The Series: TERRIFIER
In accordance with the release of TERRIFIER 3, here are my collected thoughts regarding Damien Leone's previous films featuring Art the Clown.
NOTE:
While Art the Clown - who was originally played by Mike Giannelli, before David Howard Thornton definitively took over the role from Terrifier (2016) onwards - did appear in Leone’s work before 2013’s All Hallows’ Eve, via his earlier short films, The 9th Circle (2008) and Terrifier (2011), I skipped past reviewing those shorts individually, since they comprise two out of the three stories in All Hallows’ Eve’s hastily-slapped-together anthology narrative. Just thought I’d clarify that up top…
ALL HALLOWS’ EVE (2013)
★½
“Piece of shit. Why am I watching it?”
Well, we’ve all got to start somewhere, don’t we?
Were it not for the Noir Deco synth score, the nightmarishly reality-bending nature of the finale, the no-holds-barred mean-spirited grisliness of the gore in the last third of the film (by which I mean the gore ported over via the inclusion of Damien Leone’s pre-existing 2011 Terrifier short, dovetailing with the added gore in the bleak conclusion of All Hallows’ Eve’s wraparound narrative), and the character of Art the Clown being so evocatively vicious and visually distinctive, it would be a lot easier to write off All Hallows’ Eve as worthless low-budget horror schlock, undeserving of anyone’s time.
But for its part in launching Art the Clown as a potential new icon in the pantheon of horror movie villains, and in light of what the Terrifier franchise would blossom into after this rather inauspicious beginning (which I say in the hopes that the proper Terrifier films will actually be to my liking a lot more than this), All Hallows’ Eve is, at the very least, a somewhat interesting footnote.
TERRIFIER (2016)
★★½
“He thinks what he is doing is funny because he's laughing. But I know it's not funny because they're all dead.”
If there’s anything Terrifier gets right about its slasher movie ambitions, it’s that if you don’t have the best writing, acting, cinematography, or ability to muster up a half-decent foreboding atmosphere or sense of suspense, then the very least you could do is make the villain as memorably evil, and the kills as inventively gory, as humanly possible.
And boy howdy, does Damien Leone most definitely bring the heat on that front.
When all else fails - be it the paper-thin characters making stupid decisions (DOES NOBODY HAVE ANXIETY BRAIN TO TELL THEM THEY HAVE NO REASON TO THINK THEY’RE SAFE?!!), or the film’s pacing losing a lot of its steam and dragging itself past the feature-length finish line after That Scene happens - the sheer unbridled malevolence and darrrrrrrrrk humour of Art the Clown, coupled with the incredible practical gore effects, and the especially evil, sick, twisted, depraved, vile, shocking shenanigans Leone imagines for him to inflict on other people, are just enough to elevate Terrifier into novel memorability by virtue of its splattery excesses.
Plus, it’s certainly an improvement over Leone’s previous film, All Hallows’ Eve, so I commend the creative progress, not to mention the multiple hats he proverbially wears behind the scenes to bring these films to fruition.
And hey, while her character may have suffered the worst fate out of anyone in the movie (and one of the worst fates of any character from any movie ever, quite frankly), it’s nice that Catherine Corcoran can nowadays be found co-hosting the podcast Scream Dreams with fellow scream queen Barbara Crampton, and James A. Janisse from Dead Meat!
So that’s all good then.
Damien Leone’s
TERRIFIER 2 (2022)
★★★★
- “That's disgusting. Creative, but disgusting.”
- “Ehh, I wouldn't say that before you try it. It's pretty tasty!”
Okay, Damien Leone, now we’re talking! Now we’re cooking! Now that’s what I’m talking about! Now that’s what I call music! (Wait, nix that last one.)
After his previous two Art the Clown-fests - 2013’s All Hallows’ Eve, and 2016’s Terrifier - both had perishingly little about them to recommend beyond the excellent practical effects, the gratuitous extremes of the violence, and Art himself as a character, Leone’s surprise sleeper hit, Terrifier 2, at long last delivers on the promise this burgeoning series had erstwhile left unfulfilled.
Virtually every single aspect of Leone’s craft has been dramatically improved upon, with nary a cent of that slim-yet-mighty $250,000 budget going to waste.
Where his previous efforts suffered from often looking uglily cheap, Terrifier 2’s lighting, shot compositions, grainy grindhouse film emulation, and general autumnal Halloween atmosphere are all finally on point in looking and feeling sufficiently cinematic, and even beautiful at times, in that grungy, Rob Zombie sort of mould.
Where once his non-Art characters were bog-standard cardboard cutouts who only existed for slasher fodder, with the performances to match, Terrifier 2 sees him introduce multiple believable, sympathetic characters, portrayed by genuinely good actors, to root for the wellbeing of, in the form of the fractured family unit of Sienna (Lauren LaVera), her brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), and their mother Barbara (Sarah Voigt). Sure, the tropes they each inhabit are well-trodden in the realms of both horror, and coming-of-age dramas, but they’re nonetheless still effective, and with the film’s protracted 138 minute runtime, enough breathing room is given by Leone to allow for unhurried moments of character depth in between the bouts of bloody mayhem. Even the mother, who frequently teeters on the precipice of becoming a figure to hate for how she treats her children, is given enough grace notes of empathy to enrich and inform who she is, which is a level of storytelling maturity and restraint one mightn’t expect from the same writer/director who just one film earlier had a woman get graphically Bone Tomahawk’d to death.
But of course, the MVP of the protagonists is newfound scream queen Lauren LaVera (not to be confused with British presenter Lauren Laverne, as I saw LaVera often have to correct people about on Twitter a couple of years ago, when Terrifier 2 started blowing up through word of mouth). Where Art is a modern horror monster for the ages, so too is LaVera’s Sienna a modern final girl here to rank high among the final girls that came before and after her, with her iconic avenging angel warrior woman getup primed for cosplaying tributes for years to come, along with her emotional and physical strength, and her fortitude against Art’s myriad sadistic cruelties, making her a heroine you want to see kick that bastard clown’s demonic ass all the way back to Hell, or wherever that pantomiming prick comes from, per the hints of the supernatural mythos Leone has been gradually building.
Speaking of Art, we cannot forget the sublimely slithery performance of David Howard Thornton, whose tightly controlled yet unpredictably spontaneous physicality always makes Art as unnerving as a venomous spider - deathly still one moment, bursting into wriggly life the next, stalking and toying with its prey, until it pounces with inhumanly sudden speed and strength. Except Art is no wild animal. He’s a calculatory beast with no moral compass, and a trolling sense of tar-black humour, like if Pennywise grew up on a diet of Adult Swim and 4chan. He’s a jokester who doesn’t care about arbitrary rules or lines not to cross, and his favourite jokes are the ones involving killing people in the sickest, most painful ways he can think of, and laughing at the horror on the faces of those who discover his handiwork. Yet in the hands of Thornton’s expert embodiment of the role, Art is sometimes disgracefully funny (he is a clown after all) in his off-the-cuff reactions to slight inconveniences, and in his over-the-top-of-over-the-top desecrations of bodies from the inside out. (Special shoutout also to Art’s insanely creepy little girl clown accomplice/apparition - played by Amelie McLain - who sometimes out-creeps Art’s creepiness with her eternal rictus grin, and her eerie glowing eyes, reminiscent of the children from Village of the Damned, or the vampires in Tobe Hooper’s ‘Salem’s Lot.)
Did I adequately address the gargantuan magnitude of blood, guts, gore, and voluminous viscera Leone drenches the film in? Because if I didn’t already, let me be abundantly clear:
If this were released in the 70’s or 80’s, Terrifier 2 would be a supreme video nasty of the sort that would upstage the notoriety of Driller Killer or I Spit On Your Grave, absolutely get banned by the BBFC, definitely get you arrested if you were found with a copy, and which would’ve unquestionably made Mary Whitehouse’s head fucking explode.
If this were a book, you’d certainly shelve Terrifier 2 in the extreme horror/splatterpunk subsections, because Leone’s films are unabashedly of a piece with that movement of boundary-pushing literatures that go out of their way to disgust, repel, and flout any semblance of good taste, revelling in all manner of outrageous grossnesses to absurdly degenerate degrees, such as in the likes of Matthew Stokoe’s Cows, Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse, Terry Musalata’s Baby in a Blender, or the works of Aron Beauregard (of The Slob, and Playground).
Without any impositions placed on him by a studio or ratings board, Leone does not fuck around, with no half measures taken, and no skimping on the cartoonishly grotesque depictions of bloody brutality. Eyes are gouged, faces are torn, skulls are cracked, innards are outed, skins are flayed, bones are broken, limbs are bifurcated, flesh is gnawed… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Strong stomachs are 100% a must for a viewing of Terrifier 2, and I don’t say that lightly.
The best part of Leone’s overall improvements is that, unlike in his earlier Art the Clown movies, I now finally felt something! Instead of merely the monotonous drone of watching a slasher flick go through the expected motions, Terrifier 2 had me dutifully engaged with the story, and with the tension and horror and highs and lows the characters endure! And in so doing, Leone not only made a horror film worth watching, remembering, discussing, and celebrating, but he also made what amounts to a modern horror epic. Epic in length, epic in scope of its hinted lore, and especially epic in its bloodshed. Successfully marrying his splattery excess with many moments of genuine heart, exceedingly black comedy, and unrelenting nightmare logic unbound from the rules of reality, I was surprised to find myself thinking that Leone had miraculously managed to make a film that old-school, Evil Dead-era Sam Raimi would be proud of.
(That’s not to say I think Damien Leone is Raimi’s equal or heir apparent among those in the present-day horror scene, or anything as bold or unsubstantiated as that. I just mean to express a variation of my earlier assertion about Terrifier 2 having the gnarly spirit of the video nasties it surely takes inspiration from, and thus it would keep good company with Raimi’s The Evil Dead in all their shared, splattery, Stephen King-approved glory.)
With this film giving me cause to jump aboard the Art the Clown bandwagon with enthusiasm instead of trepidation, I am now ready and eager to see where Leone goes from here in Terrifier 3…
