Just like Ed the Happy Clown in the legendary alternative comic Yummy Fur, the evolution of Art the Clown accelerates with each installment. The first Terrifier is an extreme flesh-and-blood show with no backstory for the killer and an intentionally minimalist structure. The second turned all that around in an ingenious way, opening up even more mysteries instead of revealing more of Art’s history. But I was not prepared for the leap forward Terrifier 3 would deliver.
If you don’t live in the nightmare realm of horror, you may not be hip to the devil’s bargain we get with watching terrible movies with good special effect sequences. The horror parts are great, but the in-between is usually sub-normal twaddle. Leone has written a real movie here, and by real I am talking about like they did back in New York in the Seventies. It is like what it would be like if Stallone wrote disembowelment ballets. Not since the golden age of the day have I seen such care go into storytelling to draw the viewer into being on the screen with the in-between bits. This isn’t just a great horror movie; this is a great movie, period.
“Leone has really carved out his own section of the screen for spectacular extremities.”
Leone’s intricate building of each unfolding wave of carnage is truly masterful, as is his ability to turn what started as a grotesque piece of slapstick into an engrossing epic of grossness whose boundaries keep expanding. And just like in the golden age, legendary acting work keeps the heart of the picture spouting blood. LaVera is so amazingly perfect in this latest incarnation of Sienna, who is becoming THE classic cinema heroine of 21st-century horror. And Thornton is better than ever, as his silent movie clown gone homicidal has a more polished edge than ever.
And you now can watch Terrifier 3 every Christmas while everyone else gobbles up the warmed-over Jimmy Stewart crap. It is a holiday black mass welcoming the historic arrival of a new cinematic dark age with endless fountains of fake blood and popcorn butter.
"…an engrossing epic of grossness whose boundaries keep expanding."
