This week on Wow A Chainsaw Fits Right In There Perfectly Theatre is Terrifier 3 (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), a Christmas-themed slashterpiece that decks the halls with bowels of holly. The Terrifier film series offers an inspiring story of a filmmaker being increasingly rewarded with praise and money for delivering sicko-splatterfests starring new horror icon Art the Clown, a mute mime of a murder-happy maven who chops up children and mocks their pleas for mercy. Director Damien Lewis launched the nothingbudget series in 2018, nabbing a big enough cult following for Terrifier to inspire a 2022 sequel, Terrifier 2, which grossed $15 million, a number that’s not insignificant, considering it’s 60 times the original budget. And the quest for an even mightier profit margin and freshly blecchy displays of spilled guts continued with the third film, which had the audacity to outpace majorly expensive Hollywood megamovies, and has raked in a stunning $87 million. Lots of people are into this shit, it seems, and part of me believes that sussing out reasons why will be even more depressing than watching the actual movie.
TERRIFIER 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Before we get to the masturbating-with-a-big-shard-of-glass and chainsaw-in-the-butt-crack scenes, we have to watch the delightful bit where Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) dons Santa garb and dismembers little kids with an axe on Christmas. Don’t worry, though – the children die offscreen, and you only see lingering shots of the gruesome aftermath, so you won’t be offended! Then we get a sequence in which Art reunites with Victoria Heyes (Samantha Scaffidi), one of the Terrified people from the first movie, who’s now demonically possessed in a sort of post-zombie state, and, with her scarred-up exterior and mottled eye and gnashy chattery teeth, very much looks the part. There’s a bit where she settles in for a nice long soak in a tub full of her own blood and bodily gravies that made me wonder what that might smell like, then immediately regret entertaining the thought.
It takes 20 minutes to get to anything resembling a plot. Eventually, we re-meet Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera), the survivor of Terrifier 2, fresh out of the mental hospital. She moves in with her aunt Jess (Margaret Anne Florence) and uncle Greg (Bryce Johnson), who have a sweet daughter, Gabbie (Antonella Rose), and as they sit around the dinner table all hunky-dory happy, you get the sinking feeling that these people are doomed. Meanwhile, Sienna’s brother Jonathan (Elliott Fulham), who also survived the last movie, is off at college, trying to move on with his life. His dingus roommate is dating a true-crime enthusiast, and as they hassle Jonathan to let them exploit his trauma for their shitty podcast, you get the hopeful feeling that these people are doomed.
Elsewhere, Art proves he’s not a superficial guy, since he shows so much interest in people’s insides. We witness how he acquired his Santa suit – it has more to do with Clint Howard than you might expect – and then how he uses said suit to gain access to a mall Santa setup so he can transform more children into angels or just corpses, depending on how religious you are. We jump between his cheery escapades and Sienna’s boring-ass life, which mostly involves playing board games with little Gabbie and being mad at the kid for reading her diary. Art really did a number on Sienna’s brain, because she hallucinates gory scenes and has bad dreams. Eventually, he’ll have to catch up to her, right? And what if he brings his assistant Victoria along for some fun? Can you say “Ho ho horror,” kiddies?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Besides the Detroit Lions games where they just won’t stop scoring touchdowns even though they’re up by 40? The Saw films, which I also found egregiously dull, but with an iconic hands-on slasher villain a la Freddy Krueger or Jason or Winnie the Pooh. I also wouldn’t mind seeing a three-way bout between Santa Art, David Harbour’s drunken Claus from Violent Night and Billy Bob Thornton’s Bad Santa if anyone out there is so inclined as to stage a mega-Xmas crossover.
Performance Worth Watching: Everyone likes to praise Thornton for his chilling pantomimes, and I’m sure it’s harder than it seems to mug and bug and ape laughter in the face of others’ suffering. I guess without his efforts, the Terrifiers might not be the nasty pop-crossover sensation that it is.
Memorable Dialogue: A fellow clown spots Art on the subway and offers praise for his costume: “Seriously, you killed it!”
Sex and Skin: A couple smashes gonads in the shower, but we don’t see any of their bits until after the bodies are mutilated. Please don’t ask if their bits get mutilated. (Spoiler alert: Their bits get mutilated, in graphic detail.)
Our Take: At the risk of sounding like a pearl-clutching, tut-tutting churchophile: What’s the point of all this? I mean, besides further hammering home the all-too-agreeable assertion that true crime podcasters have got it coming? I puzzled over this while yawning at the admittedly impressive display of excessive offal and viscera that Terrifier 3 slops on the floor in front of us, and came to the conclusion that Lewis’ main goal is to be the cinema world’s premier provider of wholesale revulsion. Just look at this nastiness! Dead children! The desecration of your most treasured holiday traditions! Intestines intestine intestines! Aren’t you shocked and appalled?
But this is a straw man Lewis props up to beat down. All the “reports” of people walking out of the Terrifier films or barfing in the aisles are almost certainly phony, because the percentage of unsuspecting people who just stroll into the theater only to turn heel and file an incident report with their pastor is nil. Truth is, Lewis plays to the audience that explicitly plops down in front of a screen hoping to see some totally righteous kills, bro. And he delivers, and then some, and then some more, and then even more, just to be sure. The director’s M.O. is essentially, why whack a torso with an ax six times when you can do it 60 times? Trim it down to a relatively modest 25 whacks, and you might get T3 under two hours, a mark that guarantees a test of patience – and does not, by any stretch of the imagination, boast a story justifying such a lengthy run time.
Which is to say, the film is grossly calculated to be gross. With a significant budget increase – reportedly $2 million, still an eensy fraction of most mainstream films – Lewis spends a big chunk of that on corn syrup, red dye and prosthetics, and upgrades his “vision” by aping slasher trendsetters like John Carpenter and Wes Craven, co-opting the dingy look and synth scores of ’80s genre classics. There’s even a ‘Terrifier Christmas’ theme song that jingles and dingles its way into your cochleas. There’s craft to the making of this film, no doubt – much credit to the makeup crew for really Going There, and going there Real Hard. You can’t help but admire the depravity, and how Lewis maintains a hateful, ugly-spirited tone with alarming consistency. But even taking into account Art’s demented Marceau-on-meth pantomime, it’s definitely not art.
Our Call: The Terrifiers are anti-arthouse horror films that deliberately have nothing to say beyond gee aren’t we nasty? If you need me, I’ll be somewhere on the spectrum between ambivalent and bored. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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