The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C+
Art the Clown returns to butcher his way through the holidays in the latest entry in the Terrifier franchise, delivering, for better or worse, exactly what fans of the series have come to expect. If you are looking for extreme gore, Terrifier 3 will not disappoint you. If you are looking for much of anything else, then look elsewhere. For me, I had about the same middling reaction as I did with the first two outings. While I appreciate Art the Clown’s emergence as a new horror icon and the return of extreme gore in the era of the PG-13 horror film, I just don’t see much else to latch onto here.
Before continuing with the review, I must mention that the true star of my movie-going experience wasn’t Art the Clown. No, that distinction goes to the couple that decided to bring their young (five- or six-year-old) daughter to see this movie. Don’t worry, they didn’t last long. The film’s opening sequence features Art dressed as Santa Clause breaking into a house on Christmas Eve and butchering an entire family. About five minutes into this, I heard an unexpected sound coming from the back row of the theater: a little girl uncontrollably crying. I, along with everyone else in the theater, turned to look in disbelief at the assholes that actually saw fit to bring a small child to the theater to see Terrifier 3. After about five more minutes, they got up and left the theater while their daughter was loudly sobbing. In a way, I appreciate being there to see a core memory created for this kid, as she will now be terrified of both clowns and Santa for the rest of her life. But I do somewhat question both the parenting skills of that couple and the dedication of AMC Theaters to enforcing their own policies.
Anyway, we begin immediately after the conclusion of Terrifier 2 with Art’s head rebirthed from the body of Victoria, the (barely) survivor of the first film. Victoria, now possessed by the Little Pale Girl from the second movie, joins Art in killing a few people before they both lay dormant. Flash forward five years at Christmas time, Sienna (the hero of the second movie) is leaving the mental hospital and moving in with her aunt, uncle and niece. Meanwhile, a couple of demolition guys unwittingly wake up Art and Victoria (a sequence that includes a nice homage to the greatest Christmas horror movie of all time, Black Christmas). The rest of the film is structured with two parallel tracks: Art the Clown killing is way through town while Sienna tries to readjust to a normal life while still being psychologically scarred by the events of Terrifier 2. Of course, these tracks are on a collision course for an eventual rematch between Art and Sienna.
Terrifier 3 does deliver on the #1 reason why people go to see these movies: over-the-top gore. The film is unrated (meaning that it would be NC-17 if it was rated) and will be quite a shock to casual audiences that are accustomed to horror in the vein of Megan and Five Nights at Freddy’s. People are graphically hacked to pieces, chainsaws go through private parts, limbs are smashed, children are blown to pieces and Art has a creative use for rats, among many other things. It isn’t often that I see something for the first time, but Terrifier 3 did provide me with a couple of such moments (I’ve never seen a shard of glass used as a sext toy, for instance). While I’m convinced that the reports of audience members vomiting and passing out during the movie are just marketing hype, casual audiences should beware. Gorehounds, though, will rejoice in the insanity on display and the excellent practical effects work.
The violence is sadistic and graphic, but also more comical this time around. Art is starting to have a character trajectory similar to that of Freddy Krueger; just as A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors started to pivot Freddy into more comical territory, Terrifier 3 is starting a similar evolution for Art. Sure, he’s still brutally torturing and slaughtering people, but he is having a really good time with it at this point. The Terrifier series, much like A Nightmare on Elm Street, recognizes that audiences are increasingly showing up to see the villain and the effects, so the films are becoming less scary and more crowd-pleasing (hopefully Art learns a lesson from Freddy and stops this trend before he dresses as the Wicked Witch and kills someone with a power glove). Regardless, David Howard Thornton is still awesome as Art and, although the performance is more funny this time, he still manages to be frightening and incredibly emotive as the silent killer.
Gore aside, there just isn’t much going on. Much of the film is Art slaughtering a bunch of characters that amount to little more than obvious cannon fodder. The individual scenes and performances are all fine, but they amount to very little in terms of a narrative; they feel more like random scenes in a highlight reel than steps in a coherent story. Sienna is again ably played by Lauren LaVera and is emerging as a classic final-girl character, but everything and everyone around her feels extraneous. Most characters and sequences could be removed from the film with little, if any, impact on the story.
The lore-heavy narrative of Terrifier 2 is toned down here, but perhaps a bit too much. While I was a bit taken aback by the abundance of fantasy and supernatural elements introduced by Terrifier 2, this may be a bit of an over-correction as most of those things are reduced to allusions here. For instance, the film doesn’t bother to explain how Sienna retrieves her mystical sword from the second movie. Considering that the sword is, for some reason, the only thing that can hurt Art, this isn’t a minor point to gloss over. Sienna’s role in all of this isn’t any more clear than it was in the last movie. She is seemingly a force of good that exists as a counterpoint to Art, kind of like Regan in The Exorcist II: The Heretic, but the film offers no further elaboration. The Little Pale Girl is now possessing Victoria, but we learn little about the character or her overarching role here. The entire thing feels more like a prologue to the inevitable Terrifier 4 than it does a standalone entry.
Fans will be satisfied by Terrifier 3, but I still wish I enjoyed these movies more than I actually do. I respect the hell out of it as an independent production and it is nice to see the rise of a new horror icon, as Art the Clown is now firmly in the second tier of horror villains (along with Leatherface, Pinhead and Chucky). It will still take a lot of work to ascend into the top tier (occupied by the horror holy trinity of Freddy, Jason and Michael Myers), but I doubt that the Terrifier movies will slow down any time soon. I’m still on board for more installments, but I hope that a bit more could be put into future films aside from the outrageous gore effects.
