Packing all the seasonal joy of a stocking stuffed with offal or a wreath made of human tongues, writer-director Damien Leone’s Terrifier 3 turns the most wonderful time of the year into a gut-churning festival of carnage. Leveling up from the viral hit that was Terrifier 2 with a bigger budget, stronger performances, and a more well-modulated tone, the film is chockablock with enough nasty delights and surprising amounts of heart to lift the series from its origins as a glorified effects reel into something near splat cinema art.
Picking up five years after the WTF conclusion of Terrifier 2, Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) is attempting to heal both mentally and physically—having barely survived her supernatural showdown with Miles County’s resident boogeyman, Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton). Though staying with her Aunt Jessica (Margaret Anne Florence), Uncle Greg (Bryce Johnson), and little cousin Gabbie (Antonella Rose) for Christmas, Sienna feels alone in her pain, what with the massacre’s only other survivor, her brother Jonathan (Elliot Fullam), away at college.
While Sienna grapples with visions of her dead friends, as well as memories of her father (Jason Patric) and his seemingly precognitive messages for her, the mutilated (and luridly mad) Victoria Heyes (Samantha Scaffidi) and a re-animated Art the Clown cut a gruesome swath across Miles County, spoiling for a rematch with the final girl. And they do so with all the spirited obscenity that the Terrifier series has made its stock-in-trade.
Where 2016’s Terrifier was a bloody amuse-bouche for the supersized gore epic that was Terrifier 2, this third entry is a veritable four-course holiday feast of peeled faces, dismembered kiddos, chainsaw-hewn butts, and masturbation by mirror shard. Primarily a vehicle for inventive and wince-inducing practical effects that best anything to be found in a 1980s-era Italian gorefest or the Saw franchise, Terrifier 3 continues the series’s trend of dotting a sparse and sinuous thread of plot with mini-masterpieces of cinematic ultraviolence. Watching it feels like gawking at hemoglobin-rich baubles hanging from a Charlie Brown Christmas tree.
Yet, Terrifier 3 feels like the most substantial of the three films thus far, in no small part for the significant focus on Sienna’s all-consuming trauma, with LaVera working overtime to add some much-appreciated emotional intensity to the narrative. Thornton is back in fine form and having a hoot, but it’s the surprisingly spooky Victoria Heyes who emerges as the film’s villain MVP, what with the overwhelming Art often playing second banana in their scenes together. Through it all, Scaffidi exudes a chilling sense of evil from beneath pounds of prosthetics.
Leone continues to expand the series mythos with supernatural-bordering-on-fantasy piffle that feels as half-formed and unserious as Sienna’s pain is sharp and penetrating. But in a popular horror landscape shaped by the shifting online lore of creepypastas and the complicated nonsense of Five Nights at Freddy’s, these nuggets of mythology will be like candy to those champing at the bit to make sense of Art’s origin and seeming immortality. For a series as transgressive as Terrifier, though, this third film crystallizes the theme of good versus evil that the previous two films gesture toward, asserting an old-school morality in a world of angels and demons with a conclusion that’s thoroughly rotten with aberrated Catholic iconography.
Of the countless criticisms that have been hurled at this artfully brutal series, the one that seems to have stuck in Leone’s craw is the graphic violence toward women. At times, Terrifier 3 suggests as much a riposte to claims of misogyny as it does a mea culpa of sorts. That is, in terms of fleshy physical devastation, it’s certainly a more equal-opportunity enterprise, as giddily demonstrated by one show-stopping, gonad-wrecking shower sequence. Art the Clown is many things—mass-murderer, occasional cannibal, all-around stinker—but a male chauvinist he is not, and to call him that is bound to land you on his naughty list.
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I will accept that Terrifier 2 was almost a good film, and perhaps this 3rd entry finally achieves true goodness, but I will never accept the first film was anything other than complete trash.